MEMORIES OF POL POT

By Roger Rosenblatt

I never met Pol Pot, but I saw examples of his handiwork. In 1982, writing a story called "Children of War" for TIME, I visited the Khao I Dang refugee camp in southeast Thailand, across the border from Cambodia. There 40,000 Cambodians who had fled Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge awaited resettlement. They had made the camp into a village consisting of straw-roofed huts, gardens and wats.

Additional elements included a rehabilitation center where artificial limbs lay stacked for those whose hands, arms and legs had been hacked off by the Khmer Rouge, and classrooms where children who had escaped from mobile work units drew pictures of their experiences: soldiers plunging bayonets into pregnant women tied to trees, or plucking out a captive's liver with a specially devised hook.

Ty Kim Seng drew himself as a skeleton. He would be about 25 today. As a boy of 10, he had dark, serious eyes and large ears that gave his face a scholarly look. His father, a doctor, had been executed by a firing squad because he was an intellectual and thus threatened Pol Pot's primitivist ideology. People who wore glasses also were killed because it was assumed they could read.

When his mother died, Seng was allowed to leave his mobile work unit and go back to his village. He asked neighbors to bury her beside his father and gave them a shirt in payment. Then he knelt, took a handful of dirt from each parent's grave and prayed that their spirits would look after him. Returning to his work unit, he disobeyed orders, went off in search of food and came across a mass grave of 30 bodies. To punish him, soldiers tied him to a bamboo pole and left him to starve for days. Eventually he escaped and walked miles on his own until he reached Khao I Dang.

A 12-year-old girl named Peov was soft-featured and plump, though like Seng she was skeletal when she arrived at the camp. The first two years she hardly spoke a word. It was through a picture she drew that the adults working with her discovered what had happened.

The drawing was of some children in a jungle clearing. A Khmer Rouge soldier had his rifle trained on them. Off to the side of the drawing was a large circle with four lines extending from the outer rim to the center, where there was a hole like a wheel's hub. Leading away from one part of the outer rim were three lines, and from another part a single line with a small ring at the end.

The children in the drawing included Peov. The soldier was forcing them to do something involving the circular device, which she explained. The lines between the outer rim and the center hole were metal blades. The three outer lines were cords held to keep the device steady. When the cord with the ring was pulled, the blades closed around the center hole, like a camera lens. Children caught trying to escape would have their heads put in that hole and be decapitated. Other children, like Peov, were made to operate the device.

I have no idea where Peov is today. Seng was adopted by a family in Massachusetts, and the last I heard from him he was studying math in a university. If the two of them saw the televised pictures of Pol Pot during the Khmer Rouge show trial, I cannot imagine what they thought of him.

He, of course, had always been thinking of them--not as individuals but as a rising class. Children were at the furthest end of his ideological chain, but they were also the most powerful, for if the innocent young could absorb his policies, they were likely to be secure. As adults, children would become the misshapen world he dreamed of, and he would darken their lives forever.

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" (Milan Kundera), which is why it is necessary not to let the brief glimpse the world had of Pol Pot be the last, and why the West, America especially, ought to call for another Nuremberg. By bombing Cambodia in 1970 we destabilized the country and were largely responsible for Pol Pot's rise; we could use some memory jogging of our own.

Not that any trial would explain why Pol Pot did what he did. One looked in vain into that age-spotted, teary-eyed face for the source of the inventiveness that dreams up a portable guillotine for children. He seemed so quiet, evil recollected in tranquillity. Time passing has made him look like an ordinary man, perhaps even to those who survived and know better.

Yet I would put Seng and Peov on any tribunal chosen to judge him, for the reason that they are the enduring casualties of his work. I picture them at the trial. They hear the evidence against him, inspect the photos of the hills of skulls and learn all that this monster did to burn over their country. But in the end it is they who condemn him--they and tens of thousands of other Cambodians now in their 20s who remember too much and wake up screaming like children.