“I see...a pile of skulls and bones. For the first time since my arrival, what I see before me is too painful, and I break down completely. These are my relatives, friends and neighbors, I keep thinking...It is a long time before I am calm again. And then I am able, with my bare hands, to rearrange the skulls and bones so that they are not scattered about.”

Dith Pran, writing about his return to Cambodia for The New York Times in 1989

Pran was a New York Times journalist and fixer who stayed behind in Cambodia to work for correspondent Sydney Schanberg during the fall of Phnom Penh. Pran was forced to leave the embassy, where journalists took shelter and was sent to the countryside, and endured brutal conditions under the Khmer Rouge. He stayed until Vietnam defeated the Khmer Rouge in 1979. His story is told in the film The Killing Fields.

“He (Pran) had taught us what friendship meant and when his luck ran out we had nothing to give him except money and food. Our abandonment of him confirmed in me the belief that we journalists were in the end just privileged passengers in transit through Cambodia’s landscape of hell. We were eyewitnesses to a great human tragedy none of us could comprehend. We had betrayed our Cambodian friends. We had been unable to save those who had saved us. We were protected simply because our skins were white. I felt ashamed.” Jon Swain. River of Time