So basically it’s like a concentration camp?


Yes, it’s like a concentration camp. They separated us into the group and the next day they put us to work because they ran out of food and we ran out of food. They told us to go work at the farm, but our family never worked on a farm before. We had to start working very hard from five a.m. to nine in the evening. I was a small child so I had to take care of cows and water buffalos. I was crying. Back before the killing fields took place, I would just go home, go to school to study, get an education, and come home to eat, sleep, and watch TV. But when they told me to take care of the cows and water buffalos, I didn’t know how to do these kinds of things.


The cows and the water buffalos were chasing me. I was crying, crying so hard and the days were passing by. I realized I had to learn how to take care of myself. There was no school and no education during the communist time. Every kid had to work hard and I was separated from my family. I came to visit my family once in a while because I was so small. I lived close to them but we were still separated. At that time my mom got sick, and when you’re sick, the Communist leaders don’t like that. They want you to go to work. My grandma had to give the Communist leader gold, jewelry, and whatever we had to give to them in order to save my mom from going to work. My dad was going to work with the Communist soldiers.


A couple months later my mom passed away. She died because she was sick, and I was taken to stay with my grandma. My father was still at work and he didn’t know that my mom had died. After that it was getting harder to survive. There was no food to eat; all we had was rice soup, only a couple of grains of rice in the water. It wasn’t enough for everyone. A lot of people died.


When my dad came back home about three months later, he found out that my mom died and he wept. He told us to just keep doing a good job and just don’t do anything that will get us in trouble. He was scared because he heard that if he taught people how to work he was going to be killed. People were supposed to figure it out themselves.