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p All three of them were no more than skeletons, just skin and bones. The boy’s arm hung loosely at his side and the girl’s body was covered with sores. They were from Swairieng Province in the south of Kampuchea, and had previously lived in a town. The father had worked in a textile factory, and the mother at the post office. After the change of government, the factory was shut down, as was the post office, and the family sent off into the jungle. There they set up a “people’s commune"—essentially a concentration camp with a machinegun tower like that at every other “commune”. The inhabitants were not allowed to leave the camp even to visit relatives.

p At the Psot “commune”, five thousand people worked on the rice paddies from dawn to dusk. They fell from exhaustion, someone dying every day. There was nothing to eat: just a bowl of rice and a little salt twice a day, while the gathering of wild vegetables and fruit was forbidden. In the time they were not working, in the evenings, from 7 to 9 pm, there were meetings, usually about Vietnam’s “aggressiveness”.

p “In the ’commune’, we were absolutely forbidden to read,” said the eldest child, a sixteen-year-old boy whose name is Kom.

p At night he would get up, creep to a nearby coconut palm, and take something wrapped in rags out of a hollow in it.

p What had Kom hidden there? A weapon or explosives maybe?

p No, something still more dangerous in the view of the authorities—books. The soldiers killed pne of the commune’s inhabitants simply because he was holding a piece of paper in his hand, which they thought was a letter. If they found a magazine or a book, the whole family was killed. This is why Kom clasped the parcel close and hurried into the jungle. There, by the light of a pocket torch, he undid the parcel 49 and read, and read, and read. In this precious parcel he kept History of Kampuchea and another four books that he had managed to hide when his school was closed down. The teachers had been arrested immediately, along with the senior pupils who might have spread “subversive ideas”. All the books were taken away and burned.

p “Later I wasn’t up to reading,” the boy went on. “My little sister Lam fell ill. Father said he’d try to find some medicine. He left but never came back. Our neighbours told us the soldiers had killed our father for having dared to ask for medicine. They made him dig a hole and buried him aiive in it. Two days later, Lam, who was only six, died.”

p Kom couldn’t go on with his story; his brother and sister were weeping, and he was almost in tears himself. It is hardly creditable that this was all happening in the modern world. Kom showed me a photograph of his mother at the front of the house they used to live in. She had a delicate oval face, almond eyes and a soft smile. “Our beautiful Si" the neighbours used to call her. And how she used to sing!

p After the deaths of her husband and daughter, Si began to look sixty years old, though she was only thirty-five. For days on end she would sit without moving. Everyone thought she had gone mad.

p One morning, she ran up to a passing officer and spat in his face. All the members of the “commune” were herded to their house. Kom, his two brothers and sister were standing next to their mother. She was ordered by the officer to sing. The woman remained silent. Then the soldiers grabbed her three-year old son by his arms and legs and simply ripped him apart. “If you don’t sing" screamed the offiicer, “we’ll kill the lot of you!”, hitting another child with his machine-gun butt. Since then Nyam has been unable to use his arm. The soldiers fell on the daughter, threw her to the ground, and began to beat her.

p That was when the mother started to sing. She sang a song that her husband had liked, about two lovers sitting by a stream, looking into the starry sky and dreaming of happiness. . . .

The soldiers poured petrol over Si and set fire to her.