REMEMBERING APRIL 17: 'Everywhere was starving and killing': N.J. resident shares story of surviving Cambodia genocide

'Everywhere was starving and killing': N.J. resident shares story of surviving Cambodia genocide

Chanty Jong, a Washington Township resident, tells her story of surviving labor camps and near death at the hands of Cambodia's repressive Khmer Rouge regime. (Staff photo by Ashley Hyman/ South Jersey Times)

New Jersey News | April 15, 2014

 

Life was great for Chanty Jong when she was 8 years old. 

Her father was the principal of her elementary school, and her mother owned a restaurant. The family of seven worked hard every day of the week, except for Sunday. On Sundays, they’d close the restaurant, catch a movie and go out for a family dinner, together.

Life was great, until one day in 1975 changed everything. 

Jong and her family were torn apart and put through hell by the Khmer Rouge, a communist faction that took control of Cambodia’s government and executed mass killings and societal restructuring under the rule of dictator Pol Pot. 

Jong, a resident of Washington Township, told her astounding story of survival through labor camps, malaria, minefields and the horrors of genocide at the Margaret E. Heggan Library last week. 

‘Everywhere was starving and killing’

When Khmer Rouge soldiers burst into their home one day in 1975, Jong and her family were one of thousands of families being evacuated from the city. They were told they’d be gone for three days and not to bring any food or clothing with them. 

Jong’s father was able to convince Khmer Rouge soldiers — who specifically targeted the educated for torture, imprisonment and death — that he was just a motorcycle mechanic, so he was able to join his family as they were lead off into the jungle with no shelter, food or water. 

The family struggled to survive in the makeshift jungle village, where people frequently died from malaria or from eating poisonous fruits they foraged in the jungle. After a year, every child between the ages of 7 to 12, including Jong, were carted off to a children’s labor camp to work to build a road.

Jong and more than 600 other children spent the next three years sleeping in mud with no shelter, given one pair of black clothing, forbidden to speak with each other and forced to work 14 hours a day with just a spoonful of nutritionally-empty mush slopped into their emaciated hands as dinner each night.

“If you were sick, you just waited to die,” Jong said. “Everywhere was starving and killing.”

During this time both of her brothers and one of her two sisters died of starvation. They worked during monsoons and given no rest. Sick children who asked for medicine were given a knife and told to carve bark off of trees so the Khmer Rouge soldiers could boil them to make them a healing tea, really a poison that quickly killed them. 

Jong came down with malaria herself and escaped death when soldiers, after finding her in camp instead of laboring, left her to die instead of killing her then.

One day, three years into their labor, the children weren’t sent to work on the road but instead lined up and tested to see if they could read. 

Something Jong’s father told her before they parted came rushing back to her — that he couldn’t be there for her anymore, but she should always pretend she didn’t know how to read or write. She feigned ignorance when it was her turn, and was taken back to camp with the other children who showed no literacy skills. 

Those who could read were taken into the jungle, tied together, shot in the back and dumped into a mass grave. The Khmer Rouge soldiers walked the surviving children to the grave the next day and forced them to look at the dead, naked children — whose clothes were stripped and given to the illiterate children — and told that is what happens to the educated.

“We were scared,” Jong said. “We thought we were going to be next, but we didn’t know when.”

Chanty Jong shares her experience escaping Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime at the Margaret E. Heggan Free Public Library in Washington Township, Thursday, April 10, 2014. (Staff Photo by Ashley Hyman/South Jersey Times) 

 ‘I closed my eyes, grabbed my sarong and ran toward the machine guns’

After three years in the camp, Jong got word her father was returning to the village her mother and sister were living in for a three-day visit. She was given permission to reunite with them for a couple of days as well. 

“I was so happy,” she said of the moment she saw her parents for the first time in three years. But that night, their homecoming was interrupted when her father was abruptly summoned by Khmer Rouge soldiers for a pressing “meeting.” Jong, then 12, secretly followed behind as the soldiers took her father deep into the jungle, where they gave him a shovel and told him to dig his own shallow grave. 

“I could see everything,” Jong said of the moment she watched her father die. “I was screaming so hard in my mind and saying ‘No, No!”

Jong managed to stay hidden and quiet, but dug up her father’s body after the soldiers left to hold him one last time. 

She returned to the camp and labored in horrendous conditions for another year, until the Vietnamese army in opposition to Pol Pot’s regime attacked their camp, unaware children lived there. The Khmer Rouge soldiers retreated to the mountains behind them as the children were hit with a barrage of machine gun and tank artillery fire.

“There was blood everywhere. Everywhere I looked, children didn’t make it,” she said. 

Surrounded by jungles full of dangerous animals on either side and Khmer Rouge behind, Jong decided that whoever was fighting the regime’s soldiers must be the good guys.

“I closed my eyes, grabbed my sarong and ran toward the machine guns. I jumped over the kids who got shot,” Jong said.

She made it past the tanks and ran to her mother’s village, in flames and abandoned. She wandered around and followed footsteps until she found a crowd of villagers retreating into the jungle including her mother who was carrying her sister, swollen from starvation, on one hip, rice pot on her head and a bag of clothes on her back. 

‘It was like fireworks everywhere’

Soon, as the Vietnamese’s victory in Cambodia altered the composition of its government and Khmer Rouge’s influence and power within it, Jong resumed life with her mother and sister. She returned to school, after her education was halted at grade 3, but was pulled out again at grade 4 to work in her mother’s restaurant. 

At 18, she was forced to either leave the country illegally or submit to mandated service in the Cambodian army and serve alongside Khmer Rouge soldiers. 

She chose to flee to Thailand instead. With all the money her mother managed to save, Jong bought passage with two guides over the minefield surrounding the Cambodian-Thailand border. Under the cover of night, 24 of them, including a woman with an infant and two-year-old child, trekked slowly through the mine field, stepping exactly in the footstep of the person ahead, as their group leader dug up and disarmed mines in their path. 

When the infant woke from its sleeping-pill induced slumber, the man leading the group shoved cloth in its mouth and held its nose to suffocate it, so it wouldn’t alert border guards to their position. The mother resisted, ripping the cloth out. The cries drew gunfire from border guards and mines exploded as they scattered. 

“It was like fireworks everywhere,” Jong said. Just 10 of them survived. 

‘I was the only one who escaped’

Across the border, Jong arrived in a refugee camp party run by the Thai government and the United Nations. The camp, however, was limited to those who had already arrived and issued an identifying nametag. Anyone found without one was deported back to Cambodia, likely dropped off at a random point in the border’s mine fields. So Jong dug a cold, muddy hole in the ground to stay in, with other refugees piling debris on top to conceal her. Only a small bamboo tube provided her air, and she survived off of other refugee’s scraps of food. 

She lived in the hole for almost two years. 

“Inside of my mind I would focus on the positive things to help me survive,” said Jong. She’d imagine her favorite foods and remembered how they tasted. 

“It made my mind feel happy as my body suffered,” she said. “That’s how I survived.”

She was soon discovered however, and rounded up with other undocumented refugees. Knowing she would be sent back to Cambodia, she managed to dig through two bamboo fences, trick Thai government soldiers who chased after her and escaped by hiding in a nearby farmer’s home. Soldiers searched the entire home except for one space — underneath the bed, where Jong hid.

“I was the only one who escaped that day,” she said.

With nowhere else to go, Jong returned to her hole at the camp and lived, breathing through a bamboo pole, for another six months. 

‘The opportunities and freedom I never had’

It wasn’t until the U.S. ambassador visited the camp that Jong was given a way out. She was taken under the wing of the ambassador, who offered to find her a sponsor in the states. 

“I always dreamed of America like a heaven,” said Jong. She was flown to the Philippines to learn about American culture, then moved to refugee house in Swarthmore, Pa. before being adopted by a sponsor family, where she lived for 10 years. 

During that time, Jong learned English, earned her GED, a two-year diploma, got married and moved to Washington Township. 

Her mother and sister are still in Cambodia, where she visited after getting her GED. Thinking she died in the mine field, they were shocked to see her. 

“It was a really good surprise,” she said.

Her mother still doesn’t know the details of her husband’s death at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. 

“She never asked, and I never explained it to her,” Jong said. “All she knows is he died.”

Both of Jong’s children, a 16-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son, however, know the horrors their mother lived through. Jong tells them so they can realize how much they have in America, and to compel them to make the most of every bit of it. 

“I raise them to make sure they break the cycle,” Jong said. “I say ‘I’m giving you the opportunities and freedom I never had.’”