Prisoners of class : a historical memoir of the Khmer rouge revolution / Chan Samoeun, Matthew Madden.

"The remarkable early account of life in Pol Pot's Cambodia, now available in English translation for the first time. In April 1975, Chan Samoeun witnessed columns of young black-clad revolutionaries-the Khmer Rouge-marching into Phnom Penh. What followed shocked everyone, as they immediately evacuated the city's entire population, on foot, into a new and unthinkable life of forced labor in the rice fields and jungles of the Cambodian countryside. There, Samoeun and his family, former city people, would live and die as virtual prisoners, re-classified by the Khmer Rouge as "new people": an expendable class targeted for destruction. When the nightmare ended four years later, millions of Cambodians had perished, including most of Samoeun's family. While many survivors fled for the safety of the refugee camps, he remained and picked up a pen. Over the next year, he wrote about his experiences in poetry and vivid prose, describing in stunning detail the fear, starvation, labor, brutality, and death, as well resilience and survival-plus young love and loss-that he had witnessed and endured under the Khmer Rouge regime. The result is both a priceless historical document and a touching, personal, and immediate account of one of the most harrowing events of the twentieth century. Originally penned in 1979-80, Prisoners of Class is one of the earliest and most detailed long-form witness accounts ever written about the Cambodian genocide, and the earliest written entirely in the Khmer language"--