Killing Fields, Living Fields

This is a book for our times as Pol Pot's lust for control in Cambodia has been re-enacted over and over again by Putin, Assad, Kim Jong-un, the Ayatollahs...

While Cambodia is best known for Angkor Wat and tourism, its enchantment hides a recent history and a poignancy beyond imagining. In the mid-1970s, starting with political, military and religious leaders, the entire nation was turned into a death camp.

Don Cormack entered Phnom Penh five months before its fall to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975. He mastered the language, and worked in the border refugee camps for years after the nation fell. As he spoke Cambodian fluently, he is able to give voice to Cambodians themselves. Here in this book, the only one of its kind, we hear first-hand accounts of endurance and faith under one of the most barbaric regimes in modern history.

The book opens with the early beginnings of the Protestant Church in 1923. From here Cormack traces the lives of several families up to, and through, the genocide under Pol Pot, and then on to the present day.

How did the mass torture, and mass killing start? Paris-educated Pol Pot and his bourgeois colleagues returned to Cambodia as Marxist zealots, and in April 1975 declared 'Year Zero'. Inspired by Mao's Cultural Revolution and Red Guards, they formed the Khmer Rouge, setting in motion the auto-genocide of the 'Killing Fields'.

Here we gain a wide sweep across decades of turmoil, while drilling down into personal stories of courage and resolve, of epic journeys, of survival; of finding the Way, the Truth and the Life.

At the time of publication only one of the Khmer Rouge leaders is still alive, in prison in Phnom Penh, now aged 93. He remains defiant.

Astonishingly, the story is also told (first broken by the Far East Economic Review in 1999) of Comrade Duch, the chief executioner, becoming a Christian in the early 1990s and being baptised. He was personally responsible for the torture and liquidation of tens of thousands. He remained faithful to Christ, and died in 2020 in prison, with a Bible and a hymnbook beside his bed. Cormack tells of his own meeting with Duch, unawares, in a refugee camp.

Index, Timeline, and three Photo Galleries. This is the eighth and final edition of a contemporary classic. It is beautifully written.