Recalling the Horror

The world may believe that Cambodian ruler Pol Pot is dead, but Kim Pok doesn’t.

Sitting in his middle-class Oxnard living room, he can still remember the day, 23 years ago Friday, when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge army marched into Pnomh Pen and the Cambodian government fell.

“They were shooting, killing, doing all kinds of things you can’t imagine,” Pok, 38, said Friday in a soft, flat voice. “Finally they made us leave the city.

“From that day until the Vietnamese came in 1979, I never thought I would survive,” he continued. “It was always in my mind that I would die tomorrow. Or today. We never knew.”

But despite being a doctor’s son, in a time when having an education was a death sentence, he did survive.

So did his mother, his father, two brothers and five sisters. And--after a seemingly endless odyssey that had them sleeping on mass graves, swimming through rivers thick with the dead, and losing most of their relatives--they arrived safe, alive and together in California in 1981.

Thousands of miles from the steamy swamps and jungles where his relatives were slaughtered, Pok greeted news of Pol Pot’s death with skepticism.

Pol Pot, the notorious Khmer Rouge leader who from 1975 to 1979 presided over the regime that tortured, starved and killed more than a million Cambodians in the “killing fields,” was reported dead Wednesday.

But it is not the first time Pol Pot, who has been protected by shadow and rumor while hiding in the jungle, has been reported dead in recent years.

“I don’t believe he’s dead. I don’t believe it,” he said in a voice still rich with the cadence of his native Cambodian tongue. “You have to live in that country. You have to know the people and the lies they have told us to understand. They would tell us two had died when it was 100. Until you see, you never believe.”

A Subject Not Even Discussed With Family

He pauses when a friend points out that Pol Pot’s body was shown on television.

“If they take his body outside, show his body, have a funeral . . . then maybe I would believe,” Pok said.

But, he says, it really doesn’t matter. “The Cambodian people cannot forgive him for what he has done.”

Indeed, for a boy who was 16 years old when his country fell, the time was so horrible, the details so gruesome, Pok never talked about it. Not with people he met. And never with his family.

Until he met Robert Harmuth in Oxnard.

Harmuth’s path had already crossed that of several Cambodians who had deeply affected him.

When Harmuth met refugee Lon Koy in Long Beach in the early ‘80s, Koy made Harmuth promise he would write the story of his country, and his people. But Koy died before Harmuth had written a word.

So when Harmuth’s daughter-in-law married Kim Pok, he decided this was his chance.

“I told him I wanted to write. It didn’t matter who the characters were--I just wanted to tell the story,” Harmuth said from his Oxnard home Friday.

With encouragement, Pok agreed to break his silence.

“There was nobody I could talk to until he came along,” Pok said.

Harmuth gave Pok a tape recorder. The result of those tapes--and additional research by Harmuth--is a book, “Khmer Warrior: A Cambodian Family Survives the Killing Fields,” written by Harmuth.

Harmuth says Pok, before he had told his story, was introverted and quiet, and that now he is more open.

But Pok still seems quiet. And when he tells a stranger the tale of his escape, he tells it without pity or drama.

He brushes over the grim details until prodded by Harmuth to tell more.

Then he wades in.

He tells of the day his family left Pnomh Penh.

There were only three ways out of the city, and millions of people were being pushed into the countryside in a mass exodus. It took a day to go six blocks--and three days to go six kilometers.

His family left the city with many of their relatives--more than 100 people. But once they got outside the city limits, he said, the larger family parted ways.

Some of his aunts and uncles wanted to head toward Vietnam. He never saw most of them again. The Khmer Rouge set up loudspeakers along the roads and in the jungles asking all teachers and government workers to return. Some of his uncles went back. He never saw them again either.

“Later we found out that everyone who went back got killed,” he said.

His father led the family--with children ages 2 to 16--toward the Thai border.

They took turns carrying the youngest child, and traded in clothes for scarce rice and salt.

His father had been wounded years before by shrapnel that struck near his heart. So Pok often had to act as the man of the family.

Once when they ran out of water, his father sent Pok onto a peninsula in the Mekong River to get clean water. He urged his son to swim to the center, where the current was strong and the water clear.

“But the dead bodies were everywhere,” Pok said. “I pushed them aside--but there were too many floating, you know.”

Arrival in the U.S. With One Possession

The nightmares never ceased.

The family feel asleep in a house one night, and awoke in the moonlight to find the backyard stacked with bodies from the royal army. Another night they awoke to find worms in their clothes. They were sleeping atop a mass grave.

“It was just chaos,” Pok says.

When he finally left a refugee camp in Thailand years later, to come to the United States with his family, he had only one possession: a tiny black Buddha handed down through his family since the 13th century.

It belonged to his grandmother, who gave it to his mother. It was always carried by those in his family who went to war.

Today it sits in a tiny Buddhist shrine in his house.

“That’s the one thing I never left alone. It was just like my life,” he said. On his trek, he kept it close to his body--often in a scarf wrapped around his neck.

“I believe it helped me through,” he said.

Sometimes he tells his 8-year-old daughter about how he once ate tarantulas. “I tell her that, and she says, “Yuk!,” he says, smiling for the first time.

But otherwise there are few traces of Cambodia in his life. He works at an American company as an electric technician. He rarely eats Cambodian food. His wife is American. He doesn’t observe Cambodian holidays. He would rather forget it.

“You still like rice,” prompts Harmuth.

“Yeah. I like rice,” he says. “But I like steak better.”