Survival in the Killing Fields

Survival in the Killing Fields
by Haing Ngor

Survival in the Killing Fields
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Book Summary Information

Author: Haing Ngor
Contributor: Roger Warner
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-12-26
ISBN: 0786713151
Number of pages: 528
Publisher: Basic Books

Book Reviews of Survival in the Killing Fields

Book Review: Portrait of the human soul or God in absentia.
Summary: 5 Stars

This is the closest picture to hell I have ever read or heard about. This cambodian civil war (war between fellow-citizens) is nothing short of the ideal governance of a country by Satan himself. The amazing thing about this book is actually not the story itself but the fact that it is so well narrated by an eyewitness civilian, who besides, survives three episodes of torture among many other miseries. It is so naturally and realistically told that it provokes vivid impressions on the reader.

I would like to discourage the view of the film "The killing Fields" as it's nothing close to the voice heard in this book and the facts narrated in it. The movie, more than tedious and flawed, is a poor contribution to the book. Political propaganda, anti-American resentment, and other hatred-filled reasons. The movie's authors -in my opinion- have insulted Haing Ngor by telling a completely different story and shifting the story's hero to the Washington Post correspondent. Nauseating!

I'd like to comment on 3 lines of thought that the reading of this great book left on me.

First (as you'll see in the quotes below) is the much-talked about role of intellectuals in society. So much discussed but still unfathomable to us, God-fearing folks.

Second, the ascetism of dictatorial leaders (communists or any other breed) that is well studied in 'The Revolutionary Ascetic' by Bruce Mazlish.

And third: A final and personal thought on the condition of human orphanage when separated from God.

Interested at the beginning of the book in finding out how a victim and eye-witness would discribe this war, I found myself with a more down to earth picture, void of politics and cynicism: the portrait of the human soul.

"What amazed me most about Chea Huon was the change in his character. He was the first intellectual I had ever known. He was very smart. But if he was smart he couldn't possibly believe what he was saying to us now, in the dam dedication ceremony."

"A story arose that Chea Huon left for the Thai border with his jeep and his bodyguards and bags of dollars and gold. I don't know if it was true, but it is possible."

"Earlier on in the regime, couples who wanted to get married had to get permission from their village chiefs. (...) In prison I had seen lines of women being led away for breaking Angka's puritanical rules of behaviour."


"But the Vietnamese went from one of us to the next, pointing their weapons and asking through interpreters whether we were Khmer Rouge. (...) I thought: Well, it's happening again. They say they are liberating us but they have tied us up. Just like the Khmer Rouge."

Summary of Survival in the Killing Fields

Nothing has shaped my life as much as surviving the Pol Pot regime. I am a survivor of the Cambodian holocaust. That's who I am," says Haing Ngor. And in his memoir, Survival in the Killing Fields, he tells the gripping and frequently terrifying story of his term in the hell created by the communist Khmer Rouge. Like Dith Pran, the Cambodian doctor and interpreter whom Ngor played in an Oscar-winning performance in The Killing Fields, Ngor lived through the atrocities that the 1984 film portrayed. Like Pran, too, Ngor was a doctor by profession, and he experienced firsthand his country's wretched descent, under the Khmer Rouge, into senseless brutality, slavery, squalor, starvation, and disease?all of which are recounted in sometimes unimaginable horror in Ngor's poignant memoir. Since the original publication of this searing personal chronicle, Haing Ngor's life has ended with his murder, which has never been satisfactorily solved. In an epilogue written especially for this new edition, Ngor's coauthor, Roger Warner, offers a glimpse into this complex, enigmatic man's last years?years that he lived "like his country: scarred, and incapable of fully healing."

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