When the War Was Over by Elizabeth Becker Read Free Book Online Page B

an order by loudspeaker to everyone in the hotel telling them to leave; the hotel was not a protected zone. The foreigners went to the French embassy. The more sophisticated Cambodians, like the engineer Komphot had just met, knew the French embassy could not protect natives.
    If he had allowed himself, Komphot might have screamed in dismay. One part of him was saying, “This is the last day I’ll walk down these streets of my home.” Then he checked himself. “This can’t be true. I must give them the benefit of the doubt. We’ll all come back.” He retraced his steps in search of his cousin, In Nhel, the head of the railway. He couldn’t face this nightmare alone. By chance he found his cousin one block later, and the two drove off in Nhel’s car to the outskirts of the city, to a neighborhood known as Tuol Kok, where Nhel owned a small hut secluded from the road.
    There they hid with Nhel’s family and quietly talked. They wanted to forget the Khmer Rouge. “I wouldn’t let myself go crazy,” Komphot said. “I had to hope. I couldn’t imagine giving away a child after one day of the Khmer Rouge. I didn’t want to overestimate what the Khmer Rouge were doing. I wanted to be rational.”
    After three days their hiding place was discovered in a systematic sweep of the city by the Khmer Rouge. A soldier came up to their door and said politely, “Brother, comrade, please move out. You have to go at least three miles out of the city. The imperialists are going to bomb the city. When it is time you can return.”

    Now Komphot wanted to believe the bombing story. He and his cousin left with the family but without their valuables and did as they were told. They left the city in the direction of the northern Route Five. The Khmer Rouge had told them to return to their home villages, the village of their parents or grandparents. Since Phnom Penh was Komphot’s “home village,” he decided to follow his cousin Nhel to his home village, a small town in Kompong Cham province. In a few hours they caught up with the multitudes, the people who had been banished while Komphot was counting bank notes.
    They were on the outskirts of the city, a thick sea of people jammed on the narrow highway being marched to the countryside by the soldiers in black pajamas. Komphot was reminded of a crowd caught in a sports stadium with no exit for escape. It also seemed to him as if a giant had poured everyone out of the city and they were pretending not to notice. The rich still had money and were buying food from roadside merchants asking absurd sums: $100 in Cambodian currency for a pound of rice, $50 for a fish caught in a canal. The poor had nothing and went without. The sick lay dying on the roadway. No one stopped to help a stranger. No one thought of confronting the Khmer Rouge and ending this pathetic march. That would require confronting a lifetime of illusions, so they trudged on. Every day at 4:00 P.M. they were told to sleep, spilling on top of each other. Before dawn they were waked and told to march on. They stuck in cliques with people of their own class or background. Komphot and his cousin and his family walked with other educated Khmer from Phnom Penh; shopkeepers walked with shopkeepers, beggars with beggars. Like this Komphot marched for ten days until the crowd of thousands reached a crossing at the Tonle Sap River and Komphot and his cousin traveled east, toward the home village.
    They stopped at Prek Kdam, on the other side of the river, a small village now crammed with some 30,000 people also waiting to move on to their home villages. Here there was food and Khmer Rouge officials were waiting to screen the people. In Nhel was called before one. Komphot had been told by people in the crowd that the Khmer Rouge determined whom they wanted by asking certain people to write their “biographies,” a description of their lives, particularly what