This collection brings together first-person accounts by people who survived the Khmer Rouge regime as children and adolescents.

It preserves a series of individual memories: families separated, cities emptied, children placed in forced-labour camps, hunger made ordinary, and disappearance becoming part of the grammar of daily life. The narrators write retrospectively, but the memories retain the blunt, often fragmentary logic through which children first understood what was happening around them.

Compiled by Cambodian photojournalist and survivor Dith Pran, whose experience became central to The Killing Fields, the book is especially valuable as an act of collective testimony. The accounts differ in voice, circumstance and later destination, resisting the flattening effect by which historical catastrophe becomes a set of statistics or a single representative story. Several follow their narrators beyond the collapse of the Khmer Rouge into refugee camps, migration and the difficult work of building an adult life around childhood memories that have never become safely past.

This is difficult material, frequently graphic, but the book does not trade in atrocity as spectacle. Its force lies in accumulation: one remembered meal, one missing parent, one march, one night of waiting after another. Ben Kiernan provides the introduction, placing the memoirs within the history of Democratic Kampuchea without crowding out the survivors’ own speech.

Silkworm Books, 1997. Thailand and Indochina paperback edition. Light rubbing and edge wear to covers, with a small crease to the lower front corner. Binding firm; pages clean.