I’d like to share a little bit about a book I’ve been reading.

Its called First They Killed My Father, and an autobiographical account of a young girl’s life during the Pol Pot regime in the mid to late Seventies, told from her perspective as a child. [History in a nutshell depending on what your awareness/age is: Pol Pot was a tyrant who ushered in an incredibly oppressive communist-type government in 1975, manipulating the poor and uneducated masses much like Hitler with the Nazi Party’s accession to power in the 1930s. He killed one-fourth of the population by the early Eighties by prosecuting the educated, successfully launching the largest genocide per capita of all time.]

The book follows the narrative of young protagonist Loung Ung, whose upper-middle class family tries to escape the grasp of Pol Pot’s regime, but ultimately falls subject to his regime’s violent grasp, a story common to millions of other Cambodians. Ung’s family of nine moves to a Khmer Rouge village settlement (similar to the Nazi concentration camps), where they hide their former life as an educated, well-to-do family to survive. The Khmer Rouge placed an emphasis on killing families and individuals who were educated, forcing those who were to act as peasants and forget their former lives, although they often were killed anyways.

As I approach the end, I’m finding it difficult to continue turning the pages. Not because it isn’t engaging (its a very well-written book), but because the book is so relevant. Maybe not to me, but to my Cambodian coworkers whose parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and/or grandparents were killed or misplaced during the Khmer Rouge. It is an unfathomable reality for me to think of not knowing my parents because they were killed during the Pol Pot regime when I was a young child, but it is a common reality here. Twenty-five percent of Cambodia’s population was killed in less than a decade, and consequently, families across Cambodia are incomplete.

There is, however, also a positive message. The protagonist is truly an inspiration, having endured years of oppression, starvation, and deaths of loved ones to overcome  immense adversity and become a contributor to the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize for her work on advocating the removal of landmines. So if you’re looking for a tragic but powerful read, I recommend this one.