Hang Nget : The Only Girl Among the Dead — A Childhood Shattered by the Khmer Rouge

Born in 1958, the eldest child of a Cambodian farming family, Hang Nget was sixteen years old when the Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975. Over four years, she lost her father, four brothers, and nearly everything that had constituted her life. Her testimony, collected in 2010 by TPO Cambodia and preserved in the DC-Cam archives in Phnom Penh, stands as one of the most shattering documents in the memory of the Cambodian genocide.

Hang Nget, Khmer Rouge survivor. Pursat Province, Cambodia. © DC-Cam / TPO Cambodia

There are survivals that resemble dark miracles. Hang Nget's is one of them. In a country where nearly two million people perished between 1975 and 1979 — between a quarter and a third of the total population — she crossed four years of Pol Pot's regime as one crosses a minefield: losing everything, except breath. Hers is not the story of a heroine or a fighter. It is the story of an ordinary young girl, thrust into the extraordinary horror of a state that had decided to rebuild the world from zero by erasing the people within it.

Her testimony was collected on 16 July 2010 in Phnom Penh by TPO counselor Srea Ratha, as part of the testimonial therapy program developed by TPO Cambodia (Transcultural Psychosocial Organization). It is now held in the archives of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, DC-Cam.

The Cherished Daughter of a Rice-Farming Family

Hang Nget was born in 1958 in Kandal Province, at the heart of the Mekong Delta. She was the eldest of six children — five younger brothers would follow — the only girl in a family of boys. Her parents were farmers, cultivating rice on a plot of land too small to properly feed the family. Poverty was the ordinary backdrop of her childhood, but there was also love: her mother taught her to cook, to manage the household, and Hang Nget remembers being her parents' favorite, perhaps because she was their only daughter.

At ten, illness nearly claimed her — a severe bout of measles, and her mother feared she would not survive. She did. It was the first time death circled her without taking her.

In 1971, the civil war tearing Cambodia apart since Prince Sihanouk's removal in 1970 began encroaching on rural life. The family, driven from their land by poverty and bombing raids, relocated to Takmao. It was there that Hang Nget's father was killed — struck down during a bombing, in full view of his family. She was thirteen years old.

"My whole body was shaking. I was crying. I was overwhelmed by fear and grief."

April 1975: The Great Deportation

On 17 April 1975, Khmer Rouge forces entered Phnom Penh. Within days, the capital — and every city in the country — was emptied of its inhabitants. The Angkar, the regime's supreme 'Organization,' declared that cities were breeding grounds for bourgeois corruption. Millions of Cambodians were put on the roads on foot, at gunpoint, without delay, without explanation.

Hang Nget and her mother gathered what they could carry — rice, a few belongings — and joined the human flood. Along the road she saw two freshly killed soldiers. The column marched from village to village, from Takmao to Svay Chrum, her birthplace, before being pushed north again. Five trucks brought them to a railway station. Destination unknown. Only upon arrival did the guards announce it: Pursat Province. People were distributed among villages emptied of their original inhabitants. Hang Nget's family was settled in a stranger's house in Chungruk village.

Hunger as an Instrument of Government

At first, the Angkar distributed rice — half a can per person, meaning three cans per day for a family of six, a barely tolerable ration. Two months later it was cut to two cans, supplemented occasionally with dried banana. Some days, nothing at all. Her mother boiled small amounts of rice mixed with banana tree trunks and papaya roots to feed six people. The regime also imposed a uniform: black clothing only. No colors, no individual identity.

At sixteen, Hang Nget was assigned to a mobile youth brigade. She planted rice and dug irrigation canals under the crushing heat. She was permitted to visit her mother only once every ten days.

"There was never enough to eat, and we had to work until midnight. Hunger was everywhere, all the time."

1976: The Year the Brothers Died

1976 was the deadliest year for the Hang family. Four brothers would perish within a matter of months.

The third son, ten years old, had repeatedly stolen leftover rice from the communal kitchen out of hunger. When the Khmer Rouge guards caught him, the punishment was public and deliberate — designed as an example. He was laid face-down in a rice field. A wooden board was placed across his back. Three adult guards stood on top of it. The boy screamed. He cried out to his sister and his mother for help. Hang Nget and her mother stood only meters away. They could not move. They could not cry out.

Later, her mother learned he had been killed for stealing a piece of meat. She had followed the guards at a distance of fifty meters and watched them strike her son on the back of the head with a long stick, then throw him into a bomb crater and cover him with earth.

"When I heard what they had done to him, my body started shaking. I cried alone for several days."

A month later, the fourth brother died of an untreated infection at a rural health center. The fifth succumbed to what survivors called the 'swelling disease' — a generalized edema left untreated — at another facility. The last brother remaining in the cooperative died of an untreated jaw infection in the village. Of five brothers, only one survived the entire regime: the one who had been sent to live with an uncle in Kampong Speu before the deportations began.

Surviving at Any Cost: 1977

In 1977, sick and swollen with edema herself, Hang Nget learned her mother was lying in the dying ward of a health center. She escaped her own clinic illegally at four in the morning and moved through the dark jungle. Along the way, she encountered five Khmer Rouge soldiers pushing around ten men — in their underwear, hands tied behind their backs — into the forest. She heard voices from the trees begging: 'Don't kill me.' She kept walking.

She found her mother still breathing. She stayed one illegal night and day at her side, boiling krasang flowers for her to eat and drink. Her mother ate. Her mother survived.

"My mother told me later that she survived because of the krasang flowers I had cooked for her."

January 1979: The Jungle of the Dead

In January 1979, Vietnamese troops swept into Cambodia and toppled the regime within weeks. Hang Nget fled the Rumlich jungle on foot toward Rumpek village. The jungle was an open charnel house. Bodies lay between the trees — adults and children alike, dead of starvation. Their frames were skeletal, the skin drawn tight over bone.

"In the jungle I saw a lot of dead people, even children. They had died of starvation. This image remains in my mind even when I close my eyes."

That vision never left her. Decades later, at the time of her testimony in 2010, she still describes the symptoms: fear, tension, palpitations. To manage them, she walks, exercises, and burns incense sticks in prayer for the dead, asking that they be swiftly reborn.

After: Rebuilding a Life on Ruins

In December 1979, Hang Nget married a man displaced from Kampong Chhnang Province. They had nine children together. In 2001, they opened a small noodle stall selling num banh chok — a traditional Cambodian noodle dish. She made the broth; he made the noodles. They worked side by side and lived in peace. In 2008, her husband died of heart disease while she was pregnant with their ninth child. She was left alone, in the postnatal period, with nine children to raise.

When she gave her testimony in 2010, her children had grown. One had become a Buddhist monk. Five had migrated to Thailand for work. The weight was slowly lifting. 'I often think this is my fate,' she says. 'Since the Khmer Rouge, I have lost my father, my brothers, and my husband. But my children have become adults. They have started to carry some of the burden.'

 Testimony dedicated by Hang Nget to her lost family members:

Hang Sim, her father — killed in a bombing raidHan;g Sothoeun, her brother — beaten and thrown into a bomb crater; Hang Sothy, her brother — died of starvation and untreated disease; Hang Sotktha, her brother — died of the swelling disease; Hang Sothea, her brother — died of an untreated infection

 Editorial Note

This testimony was collected on 16 July 2010 in Phnom Penh by TPO counselor Srea Ratha, as part of the testimonial therapy program developed by Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO) Cambodia. It is preserved in the archives of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), founded in 1995 to collect and safeguard records of the Khmer Rouge genocide. DC-Cam holds over 1.7 million pages of documents and more than one hundred thousand hours of survivor testimonies. Sources: dccam.org · tpocambodia.org