torture

Survival Against Impossible Odds ... The Khmer Rouge: a name synonymous with unspeakable torture, oppression, and genocide. On April 17, 1975, they invaded Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, ruthlessly combing the city and murdering thousands on their hit lists as well as anyone who would not or could not leave. Whole families perished in this atrocious campaign. San Khiev, an ex-military fisherman, bravely helped his family and friends survive until they were transported to the countryside, where his pregnant wife had to watch him be taken away for "questioning," which meant he would never return.

Kaing Guek Eav was an ordinary man growing up in Cambodia in the mid-twentieth century. But then, adopting the alias "Duch," he joined the Khmer Rouge and took charge of S21, the infamous secret security center where in less than four years at least 14,000 "enemies" were interrogated, tortured, and executed.

The Years of Zero—Coming of Age Under the Khmer Rouge is a survivor’s account of the Cambodian genocide carried out by Pol Pot’s sadistic and terrifying Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s. It follows the author, Seng Ty, from the age of seven as he is plucked from his comfortable, middle-class home in a Phnom Penh suburb, marched along a blistering, black strip of highway into the jungle, and thrust headlong into the unspeakable barbarities of an agricultural labor camp. Seng’s mother was worked to death while his siblings succumbed to starvation.

San Tran Croucher’s earliest memories are of fleeing ethnic attacks in her Vietnamese village, only to be later tortured in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge.