Yesterday, Dith Pran died at a New Jersey hospital.
A long-time New York Times photographer, Pran worked with reporter Sidney Schanberg as the Vietnam war spilled into Pran’s native Cambodia. When it became clear that the Khmer Rouge would triumph, Schanberg helped get Pran’s family out. But the two continued working until Schanberg finally had to leave; unfortunately, he could not get his colleague out with him.
Schanberg later won the Pulitzer for his coverage.
Pran lived through the genocide, barely escaping death many times. His experiences were chronicled in the Academy-award winning film The Killing Fields.
Underscoring the power of the story was the fact that the actor who played Pran, Haing Ngor, was also a survivor of the genocide. A gynecologist, he was forced to stop practicing medicine, even when his wife suffered from complications from her pregnancy. Unable to perform a Cesearean (or risk revealing themselves as educated city-dwellers), he had to watch her and their child die in childborth. He escaped Cambodia in 1980, but was killed in what was apparently a Los Angeles street robbery in 1996.
This is the trailer for this 1984 film:
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Pran continued working as a photographer after emigrating to the US. But remained a committed human rights activist, founding a project on the Cambodian genocide (Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project) and speaking frequently about his experiences. His anthology of children’s memories of the Cambodian genocide is called Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors.
A final video interview with Pran is available here.