BOOKS
Steif, William
BOOKS Holocaust of Our Times CAMBODIAN WITNESS by Someth May Random House. 207 pp. $17.95. by William Steif With my own eyes I have seen only a few of the horrors of the Twentieth Century:...
...And with the invasion of the Vietnamese—traditional enemies of the Cambodians, like the Thais-May and his sisters made their way to a Khmer Sereikar camp along the Thai border, a camp where soldiers fought both the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese...
...But in the first days of November 1979, I went to a place called Sakeo in Thailand, a couple of dozen miles from the Cambodian border...
...Yet I never grasped the complete horror of this Indo-Chinese holocaust (and that's what it was) until I read Someth May's autobiography, Cambodian Witness...
...They made no noise, as if they were too exhausted to utter sounds...
...In the second section we learn the Khmer Rouge's organizational strategies—putting millions of people to work in the fields with no rationale, killing people willy-nilly, letting many starve to death...
...Someth May was eighteen when Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975...
...And because they forced us to pretend that we knew nothing, nobody in the society knew anything...
...BOOKS BRIEFLY Cassandra THE BEST OF MARYA MANNES edited by Robert Mottley Richardson & Steirman...
...With the invasion of Henri Nan-terre, the manager of the French plant and a "greedy bully," Kit is called into action as family protector of safety, honor, and justice...
...He notes that "autobiography is not a particularly familiar art in Cambodia...
...We went for any suitable green vegetation, or for snails, tadpoles about the size of a thumb, baby frogs, grass snakes, mice, paddy-crabs and millipedes...
...his brothers were simply allowed to die...
...a Syrian soldier's head at a crossroads near the Israeli border...
...Some of the material is dated, but no matter...
...so were two sisters...
...Two million...
...William Steif is a former national and foreign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers...
...At the racetrack Kit is harassed by his old enemy, Maynard Allardeck...
...re-fuseniks frightened by a knock on the door in Kiev...
...From the Khmer Sereikar camp across the border to Khao-i-Dang was only a short (but dangerous) distance...
...The first section is warm, cheerful in many places, replete with schoolboy memories, and contrasts vividly with the life under the Khmer Rouge...
...Marya Mannes was a reporter and commentator, an editor and novelist, and one of the first American women to use the television screen for her role as a modern Cassandra...
...253 pp...
...Putnam's Sons...
...He rides horses for Princess Casilia, who is married to a wealthy plastics manufacturer, Ronald de Brescou...
...No one knows how many: a million...
...The whole society was working at maximum—and brutally enforced—inefficiency...
...Her reporting and social commentary are leavened by her light, witty verse written under the name "Sec...
...May managed to survive a variety of killing diseases, among them malaria, cholera, and diarrhea...
...I heard stories of the hell Cambodians lived under for four years—1975-1979—and of the dead...
...May was set to nonsense tasks and watched continually...
...Good entertainment for waiting rooms and long flights...
...Fenton assisted May and points out that "there have been several books about the Khmer Rouge written by Westerners [but] very little of the story has been told by the Cambodians themselves...
...and there is another reason why satisfactory accounts of the period are thin on the ground—the traumatic nature of the experience itself...
...But the camp was really a kind of fake: Its people subsisted on smuggling goods from Thailand into Cambodia...
...starvation and filth were his lot...
...For some twenty years Dick Francis has been turning out a suspense novel annually...
...After a good day's work it was possible to return to the village with what felt like a cartridge belt of food—a rat, a couple of apple-snails, a few live paddy-crabs—and as we walked home we continued looking for millipedes...
...In a country the size of Missouri a sixth or an eighth of the population was wiped out by the Khmer Rouge...
...In the first part he describes what it was like to grow up in Cambodia in the late 1960s and early 1970s, first under the regime of Norodom Sihanouk (whom May's father despised), then under the "republican" regime of Lon Nol...
...May, a bright lad who was taking a pre-med course before Phnom Penh fell, worked as an orderly in the press area of Phnom Penh in the 1970s and acquired English there...
...He writes: "The weird thing about this peasant revolution was that none of the accumulated wisdom of the peasants went into it...
...Those would have been enough for me...
...She was on the staff of The Reporter magazine from 1952 to 1963...
...in secret...
...I have only one small quibble with May's enterprise...
...They were devout Buddhists and had a large family...
...In The Best of Marya Mannes, editor Robert Mottley has selected a distinctive sampling of her work over several decades...
...He never tells us what happened to his mother, who was out of Cambodia when Phnom Pehn fell...
...Other than that, Cambodian Witness is the most thorough and most memorable account of a crime of the Twentieth Century...
...His father was a doctor, his mother a midwife...
...May, says Fenton, began this work at Khao-i-Dang, continued while working as a janitor at The Washington Post, and went through countless drafts while studying in England, where he was learning "both English and the art of writing simultaneously...
...so were the corpses stacked up in the improvised mortuary tent...
...May's book is divided into three sections...
...I returned to Sakeo time after time for a month, and life returned to those silent people, just as it did to other refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodian border...
...Threats, sneak attacks, and a near-fatal accident push the plot to a double-barreled conclusion...
...They had turned their backs on everything they knew for the sake of politics about which they knew nothing...
...Under the Khmer Rouge," during which ten of the fourteen May family members who escaped Phnom Penh together die...
...If a skilled engineer looking at what they were doing had laid down his spade and offered to design a wonderfully functioning reservoir, he would have been killed for not being a peasant...
...Afghan refugees en route to Pakistan, and scared Nicaraguan peasants near the Honduran border...
...his teeth were smashed in by a brutal overseer...
...he lost track of his remaining sisters...
...316 pp...
...It was as if the peasants who ruled us despised the fact that they had been peasants...
...Somalis starving in camps northwest of Mogadiscio...
...May's father was taken away and murdered...
...by William Steif With my own eyes I have seen only a few of the horrors of the Twentieth Century: Beirut shelled...
...Nothing worked...
...When I came back three years later, the camps were almost like towns, especially Khao-i-Dang, which is just a few miles from the Cambodian border...
...It is almost impossible to put down because it is so simply told, so gripping...
...James Fenton, the correspondent who helped him with visas and this book, says in his introduction that he received a letter from May just before Christmas 1979, beginning "I hardly say to you that I could be alive up to now...
...Consider this passage: "When we were not scaring the birds [under Khmer Rouge supervision in late 1978], we New People were keeping our eyes open for anything to eat...
...Three promising horses are mysteriously shot to death...
...She believed, passionately, in justice, in civility, and in standards of personal and professional performance...
...the second is the book's guts...
...In the final section, May relates how he and his three remaining sisters, plus two brothers-in-law, finally escaped Cambodia, via Khao-i-Dang...
...The rest we concealed by turning over the waistbands of our trousers...
...They were choked with power...
...From the 1940s to the middle 1960s she was in the vanguard as a woman journalist and social critic...
...This year's entry heralds the return of Kit Fielding, the steeplechase jockey who narrated Break In...
...At night all the creatures we caught were roasted on sticks over the remains of the cooking fires...
...Then it was on to Washington, D.C., with one sister so pregnant she gave birth three days after their arrival...
...They were refugees from the Khmer Rouge...
...Anything that could be eaten raw, we ate immediately...
...I can hardly wait...
...Sitting there on the damp ground were thousands of Cambodians...
...May is back in Washington now, writing a second book...
...Jockey Kit Is Back BOLT by Dick Francis G.P...
Vol. 51 • June 1987 • No. 6
