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Searching for the truth. Number 45. January 2003.
A Magazine of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (Khmer
version).
Family Tracing Section.
STORY FROM A GENOCIDE SURVIVOR
MS. POM SARUN:
THEIR ABSENCE IS ONLY PHYSICAL; IN THE
HEART AND MIND,
THEY ARE PRESENT AND VERY PAINFUL.
By Joanna R. Munson
September 3, 2003;
Phnom Penh – The love between mothers and daughters can be fierce. It can be
powerful, and in the face of adversity, devastating. In the tragic paring down
of her family, Pom Sarun found herself, in the last months of 1975, left with
the survival of her mother and her daughter in her hands. She was their
lifeblood, she their savior. It was she who finished her work in the rice
fields, on the dam, fishing the Tonle Sap, as quickly as possible in order to
steal away and scavenge for food for her family. Snails, palm water, extra rice,
bananas, mushrooms. It was she who, as group chief, generously doled out food
for her team and did not take more for herself, in fact accepting only the
leftovers. In thanks, her team kept secret her daily forays into the forest and
the field to nourish her dying mother and stick-thin daughter. Of course, in the
awful calculus of the Khmer Rouge regime, no amount of effort on her part, no
Herculean feats of cunning and daring, could save them. The equation just did
not work. More work did not equal survival.
Her mother, Thou
Am, had been a cook for the Prince's wife in Phnom Penh. Before that, she sold
sweets in the marketplace in Prey Veng Province, after her husband, Pom Soum,
had abandoned the family in 1953. Her humble beginnings were a blessing, for she
guided the well-educated and city-raised Sarun through the horrors of the Khmer
Rouge. She taught her to farm and to be a competent villager. She taught Sarun
to hide the education she had received in the best schools in Phnom Penh.
Sarun, born in
1950, and her two older brothers had moved to join their mother in Phnom Penh in
1956. They were raised with the Prince's family and despite their mother's
social class, attended and completed the schools comprised almost entirely of
the upper classes. After primary school, Sarun received three certificates for
her work in the lycee. After four years, she received her "diplome"; after
another one year, she received her baccalaureate 1 and then two years later, in
1968, her baccalaureate 2. She excelled in school. In 1968, she began a one-year
teacher-training course in order to become a high school teacher. In 1969, she
began her studies at both the Faculty of Pedagogy and the Faculty of Law. Her
oldest brother worked as a technician for a sugar factory and her younger
brother was a bridge installation technician.
Having refused to
marry until she completed her teacher-training course, Sarun was married in 1970
to a Chinese-Cambodian who had spent the better part of three years trying to
persuade her to marry him. She was not in love with him. But her mother reminded
her that Sarun's family was not rich, and her mother was alone in the world. And
Tain Hak Khun was a well-educated bachelor from a very rich family. He had
studied business administration in Peking and then Hong Kong, and come back to
Cambodia in 1965 to administer the family's various businesses, including their
restaurant Kok Meng, their perfume and clothing store, and their jewelry store.
He loved her fiercely, but with a jealousy and protectiveness that threatened to
stifle her ambitions. He did not want her to work, he did not want her to study,
he did not want her out in the world. In order to make him happy, Sarun began
working for his import/export business, but she refused to end her studies. In
1971, she gave birth to a baby boy, Sambot, who was followed one year later by a
baby girl named Pich Chan Mony. That tiny girl she held in her arms in Phnom
Penh, very much alive and kicking, would die quietly of starvation in Sarun's
arms five years hence, her last words whispered through the mesh of hammock,
"Mum, I am so hungry."
Sarun would have
graduated from the Faculty of Pedagogy and the Faculty of Law in 1975. Instead,
the Khmer Rouge arrived. Her brothers and their wives had already come from
outside the city to escape the bombs, and so the "liberation" found the entire
family under one roof, mother, brothers, sisters-in-law, husband, son and
daughter. They were evacuated to Sarun's mother's home village of Kompong
Krasaing. After only three months there, the Khmer Rouge murdered her younger
brother, who had worked as a soldier at the Department of Finance in the Lon Nol
regime. They came to ask the brother to work in another village, a poorly
disguised beckoning to death. He was murdered in the Koc Kak pagoda, leaving
behind a pregnant wife. His death heralded the beginning of the horrific
downsizing of Sarun’s family, from nine to four to two left alive in 1979.
After his death,
they were transferred to the region west of Phnom Penh. One sister-in-law died
from diarrhea and the other sister-in-law, having given birth to a baby boy, was
sent away from the family. Sarun's son was also sent away, to work, at six years
old, in a children's work unit. A few months after their transfer, Sarun's
husband committed suicide. The physical cause of death was ingesting the
poisonous fruit of the sen tree, which makes one's tongue bleed. But that was
just the outward cause of death. He committed suicide because he was a rich and
well-educated man who found himself incapable of taking care of his family,
because of the shame of seeing his wife hit by a Khmer Rouge soldier, because he
was starving and skinny, and because of guilt. He felt deep guilt, anguished
guilt as heavy as a bomb, because before 1975, Sarun had told him that Cambodia
would become communist, had begged him to move the family abroad. He had refused
to believe that Cambodia, with all its riches, would ever turn communist.
Impotent in the
face of the Khmer Rouge, with no skills to speak of, Tain Hak Khun was a
defeated man. Sarun told him, "Don't worry, I can do. Just follow me." But he said he could not live in this
world, it was too hard to adapt to the situation. The day after Sarun was beaten
with a cattle prod, for hiding her watch in a palm leaf (the neighbors must have
told the soldiers on her), her husband ate the poisonous fruit. The blood from
her beating at the hands of the KR soldier was little in comparison to the deep
red river that welled up on her husband's tongue after eating the fruit of the
sen tree.
In 1976, her older
brother died. Sarun explains in English: "Because of no food and the men eat a
lot and no energy, no power, skinny, skinny, skinny, works so hard, and so die.
Not just our family, all family, every family, sometimes whole families."
Sarun was left with
her mother and her daughter. At three o'clock in the morning, she would go to
the field to work, leaving her daughter to be taken care of by her mother. Her
group would work at rice planting or picking, at digging the dams, or fishing
the Tonle Sap until 12 noon, when they would stop for a meal. At 1:30 or 2:00
PM, they would begin work again, working until the sun set over the rice fields,
a red globe of flame. Sometimes, they would continue work until midnight,
lighted by the electricity from a generator. At dinner, Sarun would save her
food for her mother and daughter, wrapping it in a lotus leaf, and running
without stop from her work unit to the base camp. The fastest route to the camp
was through a mass gravesite, "but I never worry about corpses, worry only about
food to eat and the soldiers of Pol Pot," Sarun says. At night, the lightning
bugs would look like the lit tips of soldiers' cigarettes and send fear into her
heart. The corpses were buried in shallow graves and wild dogs would dig them
up. Sometimes a leg would be visible, gnawed on by the dogs and insects. The
smell was awful. Water was scarce, so the corpse-filled dirt caked on Sarun's
legs could not be washed away. Instead, they used the useless city-clothes
brought with them from Phnom Penh to wipe away the death smell.
Once in the
cooperative, Sarun would cook for her mother and daughter and they would be
happy eating together. After eating, she would run a few kilometers away to a
lake that still contained water and fill up her family's water pitchers. After
delivering the water to her mother and daughter, she would then run back to her
work unit camp and, sometimes with no sleep, begin her day all over again.
Her mother stayed
alive so long because they had jewelry, Sarun explains. At four or five at
night, Sarun would pretend to go looking for something. Instead, she would scout
out the way to the Muslim community 12 kilometers away, where she could exchange
her jewels for rice, cane sugar, and bananas. Later, under cover of darkness,
Sarun would steal away from the cooperative, with the jewelry hidden in a kramar
beneath her too-large black shirt. She would have a bamboo jug tied around her
body in which to collect crabs and keep palm water. Two kilometers to the west
of the camp, train tracks bisected the landscape, with Khmer Rouge soldiers
policing it in groups. Sometimes she would wait two or three hours before it was
safe to cross. Sarun says, "I do it alone. I believe, I trust only myself, since
I can keep myself alive until now."
The night her
mother died, Sarun returned from the Muslim community with rice, cane sugar, and
banana to feed her weak mother. Her mother was lying in bed with her head to the
east, and her granddaughter, daughter, and a cousin surrounding her. As the
others slept, Sarun began to cry and the tears fell onto her mother's skin. Her
mother said to her, "Do not regret the jewelry. We can only buy the things if we
have the life. When we die, we cannot take these things with us. You have to
sell all the things that you have to get the life."
She said, "You have
to sleep, ko-an (daughter). You work so hard and have only a half-hour to sleep
more. No need to wait up with me. There are many people around me now."
Her last words to
Sarun were, "Do not hit your daughter. Be gentle with her." She said this
because the girl had been born the same year (the year of the Pig), same day,
and same month as Sarun's youngest brother, who had drowned in the river at age
six. Now Pich Chan Mony was almost six. Her mother believed that the little girl
was his reincarnation and worried about the girl's fate.
After the death of
Thou Am, Sarun carried her daughter, papoose-style, on her back while she
worked. Her daughter could not walk, so skinny was she. Sarun walked with a
child on her back and her belongings on her head. One day she was so tired that
she told her daughter, "So, daughter, you walk." Her daughter scolded her, "But
I cannot walk." One night before her daughter died, Pich Chan Mony begged for
sugar. Sarun climbed the palm tree, a kramar around her waist, a knife secure in
its folds, and a bamboo jug to collect the water. She boiled the palm water and
made sugar, and then cooked rice with the sugar and maize. She cooked this food
to help the swelling in her daughter's limbs. The next day, it rained and
rained. Her daughter slept in a separate hammock from Sarun. Tired, hungry,
scared, sad, Sarun tried to sleep. "Mum, I want to sleep with you." Sarun was up
from her hammock, across the hut, and then with daughter in her arms, back into
her own hammock to rest. "Mum, I want to go to toilet." Tired, hungry, scared,
sad, Sarun hit her daughter. One slap on the head. One slap only. Two hours
later, her daughter was dead.
She was given one day off of work to bury her daughter.
Later, she was sent far away from the cooperative to work, since she no longer
had any dependents to take care of. Of children's deaths, Sarun remembers two
stories: sometimes when a child would die, the family would not tell anyone, in
order to continue receiving the child's food rations. Second, she recalls that
if a child died, sometimes they would cut the body up into small pieces and fry
the flesh, in order to exchange the meat, which they pretended was from mice or
other small animals, for rice and other food. Three or four months after her
daughter's death, it is harvest time and there is more food for everyone. If
only her daughter had held on.
Around April of
1977, Sarun was assigned to marry Choeuth Sarath. She says, "Because I have no
children, like that, they select by themselves that we need to marry this, this,
who." Before 1975, Sarath was a Lon Nol soldier. He was married to the sister of
a Khmer Rouge soldier, and this caused problems. Sarath was imprisoned, but he
escaped and came to work in the same cooperative as Sarun. Sarun recalls, "We
stay like brother and sister, no love....He and me never touch because I am not
happy and very tired."
In August 1977,
Sarun decided to escape to a Thai border camp, but she became sick from
malnutrition and malaria. "Now I recognize I near die," she remembers,
"Sometimes I know nothing around me." She could not stand or even sit. But she
recalled what her mother had told her, that she had to be an optimist and that
the jewelry should be used to "buy the life." Sarun begins to test the Khmer
Rouge nurses to see who would accept the jewelry in exchange for better food and
protection, and not kill her for possessing it. "Sometimes they like, sometimes
no, they kill us. So I do the test, one week, two week." She watched one nurse
who had continued to wear makeup, despite the Khmer Rouge control, "she wear the
makeup and she like herself." One day Sarun said to her, "I am near death. I
have one souvenir to give you, and when I die, this is the price you can pay to
hire someone to bury me near my mother's grave." She was being deceptive, since
she did not really want to be buried near her mother, but rather wanted to pay
for the protection of the nurse. At first the nurse refused. Sarun told her that
if she said it was a mistake and killed Sarun for it, that was okay, but if not,
then she should keep the jewelry. During the next week, Sarun was given better
food, and at the end of the week, she was selected to be transferred to a larger
and better-equipped hospital. Of the seven people transferred, only Sarun was
not a Khmer Rouge cadre. Of the nurse, Sarun says, "I think she is not the pure
Khmer Rouge. Sometimes family is Khmer Rouge, so children just follow."
The hospital Sarun
was transferred to was reserved for Khmer Rouge soldiers. The doctors were
Chinese and the food more plentiful and better than anything in the
cooperatives. Sarun says with a laugh, "There I became well and looked so nice!"
It was here that Sarun accomplished her "achievement," as she calls it. Her eyes
light up in the telling. The hospital was divided into work groups, just like
the cooperatives. Of the seven groups, the third group was the most corrupt,
"very stingy". They were supposed to be administering to the pregnant women, but
would instead use the supplies for themselves. Since arriving at the hospital,
Sarun had been very careful to conceal her education and background, acting as
if she could read and write only a few words of Khmer. Now she decided to use
her education to expose the corruption. On small pieces of paper, she wrote a
note condemning the practices of the third group. She gave one note to a
doctor's daughter who slept next to her, who in turn gave it to her father,
without revealing its author. Other notes she passed surreptitiously around the
hospital. Soon the leaders of the third group were exiled from the hospital and
sent to work in cooperatives. Sarun
laughs at the memory of her achievement.
Three or four
months after arriving at the hospital, Sarun was sent back to her cooperative.
But she never got there, "I run away and visit the graves of my family. I see
bones but never scared." Instead of returning to her work group, she ran to the
home of a middle-aged Khmer Rouge female cadre, who had been her group chief at
one point. Sarun says, "In one hundred people, maybe one, two are gentle. She
like me because I work hard, industrious." The chief had explained to Sarun how
to find her, should she ever need her help. It took Sarun three nights and four
days to make it to Battambang, but before she was able to reach the woman's
home, she was arrested. She told the soldiers that she was the group chief's
daughter, as the chief had instructed her to do, and they dragged her off to the
chief's home. The group chief accepted her into her home without
hesitation.
It was now 1978,
and Sarun worked in a cooperative near Battambang until she was transferred with
three friends to work at Phnom Sampeau. The fall of the Khmer Rouge regime to
the Vietnamese on 27 January 1979 found her and her three friends living
together in Battambang. One year later, when she went to ask the government for
a job, she met Sarath again. Sarath, with his excellent Vietnamese language
skills, had been promoted to a high position in the new Vietnamese-installed
government. Even though they had not lived as husband and wife previously, they
decided that since they had been through so much, they might as well stay
together. Sarun's son came to live with them in 1980, and another son was born
in 1981, followed three years later by her last son. At each birth, Sarun cried
constantly for her daughter. She could not stop the tears.
During this time,
Sarun worked for the public schools as a teacher, and then became director of
the high schools in 1987. She held this position until 1994, when she
transferred to work full time at the Cambodian Brewery Limited as a sales
supervisor for Region 1. Teaching was her passion, but she refused to become
involved in the system of corruption, and she could not earn enough money
without it. Today, Sarun works long hours in order to keep her sons in school in
America. She loves them deeply, there is no question.
Yet in the
retelling of her life, Sarun's mother and daughter play the leading roles. Their
absence is only physical; in the heart and mind, they are present and very
painful. They are present in her thoughts, always, constantly. The love between
mother and daughter is a fierce one, and, in the face of death, it can threaten
to consume the living. But throughout her life, Sarun has fought the elements,
worked as hard as she can, making the best of every situation. She has refused
to be consumed, and in fact her love for her daughter led her to welcome me, a
foreigner, into her home, because she saw the ghost of her daughter in my face.
A stronger woman I have rarely witnessed. In her own words, "If someone can do,
I can do. If can climb the palm tree, I can. If 53 or 54 years old, I can. I am
not scared about this."
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