Haing S. Ngor - Life Under The Khmer Rouge

Life Under The Khmer Rouge

Born in Samrong Young, Cambodia, Ngor trained as a surgeon and gynecologist. He was practicing in the capital, Phnom Penh, in 1975 when Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge seized control of the country and proclaimed it Democratic Kampuchea. He was compelled to conceal his education, medical skills, and even the fact that he wore glasses to avoid the new regime's intense hostility to intellectuals and professionals. He was expelled from Phnom Penh along with the bulk of its two million inhabitants as part of the Khmer Rouge's "Year Zero" social experiment and imprisoned in a concentration camp along with his wife, My-Huoy, who subsequently died giving birth. Although a gynecologist, he was unable to treat his wife who required a Cesarean section as he would have been exposed and both he and his wife (as well as the child) would very probably have been killed. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Ngor worked as a doctor in a refugee camp in Thailand and left with his niece for the United States on August 30, 1980. Ngor was not able to resume medical practice in the U.S. He never remarried.

In 1988, he wrote Haing Ngor: A Cambodian Odyssey, describing his life under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In the second edition of Survival in the Killing Fields, Roger Warner, Ngor's co-author, adds an epilogue telling the story of Ngor's life after winning the Academy Award.

The "Dr. Haing S. Ngor Foundation" was founded in his honor in 1997 to assist in raising funds for Cambodian aid. As part of his humanitarian efforts, Ngor built an elementary school and operated a small sawmill that provided jobs and an income for local families. Ngor's niece, Sophia Ngor Demetri, who testified at the trial of his murderers and with whom he arrived to the U.S., is the current President of the Foundation.