Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution

In April 1975, Chan Samoeun witnessed columns of young black-clad revolutionaries-the Khmer Rouge-marching into Phnom Penh, Cambodia. What followed shocked everyone, as they proceeded to evacuate the city's entire population, on foot, into a new and unthinkable life of forced labor and communist collective living in the rice fields and jungles of the Cambodian countryside. There, Samoeun and his family, former city people, would live and die as virtual prisoners, re-classified by the Khmer Rouge as "new people," an expendable class targeted for abuse and destruction.

By the time the regime collapsed four years later, millions had perished, including most of his family, and the country lay in ruins. While many survivors fled for the safety of the refugee camps, Samoeun remained and picked up a pen. He wrote about his experiences in poetry and vivid prose, describing in stunning detail the fear, starvation, labor, brutality, and death-as well as young love and loss-that he had witnessed and endured. The result is both a priceless historical document and a touching and immediate account of one of the most harrowing periods of the twentieth century.