THE STONES CRY OUT: A Cambodian Childhood 1975-1980

by Molyda Szymusiak ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1986

Now 26 and living in Paris, Szymusiak recounts the damnation and sheer agony of her Cambodian childhood under the Khmer Rouge, from age 12 to 17, including the deaths of her parents, siblings and relatives. Szymusiak is the name of her adoptive family in France. The author was born into a family of high government officials in Phnom Penh in 1962, but her autobiography begins during the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975. Few people will ever have experienced a childhood of such relentless horror, even vicariously through print. In Molyda's first paragraph she describes motorbiking along the road home during a shelling and rocket bombardment, beside a headless man ""still pedalling even though his head had been blown off! His bike crashed into the closed front gate of a high school. . ."" The family's name was Buth Keo but they changed it to the safer ""revolutionary"" name of Bang Peuw. Any hint of her family's origins would have meant execution after the Khmer Rouge drove the population of Phnom Penh into the countryside, turning these city people into a slave work force. Twenty people were in her father's and uncle's combined families, and of these only Molyda and three younger cousins survived. Everyone worked despite sickness, if he expected to eat, since all food was strictly rationed in the slave camps. If you were too sick to stand up in the rice fields or to haul dirt for road building, you could weave rushes for grass mats, however malarial or shaky you might be: human bodies were used to the last erg before being tossed into the pit of corpses behind the hospital. Death was everywhere, with bodies rotting along roads and trails, floating in rivers and ponds and in the drinking water. Bodies wearing jewelry were left in the open to tempt the unwary. Holding hands, naked couples with their throats cut lay under trees: ""They got married without permission. Rules must be obeyed."" Wolves roamed about; snakes reared up in huts. Molyda's mother's body was stripped of its fancy blouse and thrown naked into a mass grave, where her husband already lay. Gradually Molyda's elders, brothers, sisters and cousins died. In their slave village, only 100 people survived out of an original population of 1000; only three people are alive from the ten families surrounding hers. Eventually Molyda and three cousins reached a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border in 1980, were rescued by an American and flown to a new family in Paris, where a Polish historian and his psychiatrist wife adopted them. To call this book a testament to the human spirit is laughable since it equally attests to human depravity; whatever it is, it offers no easy answers, only profound questions. Black reading.

Pub Date: June 1, 1986

ISBN: 025321291X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Hill & Wang/Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1986

Categories: NONFICTION