p The soldiers came after Ang Sok and her family in midafternoon. Ang, a pretty girl of 22, had, like most young people, cheered the communist troops entering the city. But when they began shooting and looting, she retreated into the house of her cousin. . . .
p ...Ang asked the group of soldiers who ordered them out of the city where they should go. “As far away as possible.” 90 How long would they have to stay away? “For a period of time"___
p . . .“On the road, there was a huge crowd of every age and condition, young, old and sick.”. . .
p . . .The streams of benumbed and bewildered unfortunates trudging out of the city swelled steadily through the afternoon and that evening several hundred thousands people slept by the streets or roads. The next day, in the name of Angka, parties of four to six soldiers systematically went from door to door repeating the initial order, and by midmorning the streets teemed with more hundreds of thousands of people.
p A new realization soon spread: each soldier-servant of Angka Loeu held death at his or her fingertips. Given the alternative of leaving or being shot, Dost Mohammed, an electronics salesman, departed on the 18th with his wife, six children and mother. Some traffic was still moving, and a pedicab rolled past them. “Don’t go on that side of the road!" a soldier shouted. The pedicab did not alter course, so the soldier killed the driver with machine-gun fire. . . .
p . . .Near the French embassy, a French schoolteacher observed a communist patrol inarch through a line of refugees and, by happenstance, part a mother and father from their children. The frantic parents protested and sought to reclaim their children, now on the other side of the communist column. The patrol leaders fired a volley of rifle shots, killing both parents.
p Not everybody personally witnessed such summary executions, but virtually everybody saw the consequences of them in the form of corpses rapidly bloating and rotting in the sun. . . .
p . . .Then the water supply ceased throughout the city. People were reduced to drinking from ponds in parks and gardens, even from stagnant puddles. This brought on dysentery, a killer that was to treat the people as mercilessly as Angka itself throughout the great exodus. . . .
.. .Ea Than, a 27-year-old librarian left his home on the 18th in a family party of about a dozen people. “All of Pnom Penh seemed to be leaving toward the south. We were packed 91 like sardines, and progress was unbelievably slow. It took us three days and three nights to cover the two miles between our house and Monivong Bridge. All along the way the Khmer Rouge were shooting into the air and at houses. ’Go on! Move on!’ they shouted”. . . .
. . .Pnom Penh had been transformed into a wasteland occupied only by corpses, stray dogs, pigs, ducks and chickens, and Angka patrols standing guard to ensure that human life did not return. By April 23, the communists had begun to empty the other principal cities of Cambodia. Because the populations were much smaller, troops were apparently able to evacuate most of the provincial cities in less than 24 hours. . . .
Notes