TOSSING THE BABY [DURING THE KHMER ROUGE TIME]
I looked out quietly to see what was really going on, and I saw that they were shaking the baby they held cradled in their arms….tossing the baby up and down, up and down, several times….then they started throwing the baby up in the air and catching it.
Then they grabbed a rifle, pointed the sharp end of the AK rifle to the baby as they threw the baby higher into the air again.
The sharp end of the gun broke through its body when the baby came back down on it.
They dropped the baby’s corpse into the hole at their feet.
The baby’s mother, with both arms tied behind her back, had been placed on the ground next to the hole.
They began hitting her with the rifle’s butt, over and over on her neck, until finally they pushed her into the hole too.
I was standing far away and began moving a little closer so that I could see better.
They saw me and began questioning what I was doing there, asking me if I wanted to die too. [laughter]*
I was terribly frightened and although they hit me with the rifle, in my panic I managed to run away and survive.
Interviewer note:
* When survivors smile or laugh in recalling traumatic experiences, this can indicate different things about how survivors are processing their memories. It can be a way to minimize the traumatic experience; protect the survivor from feeling the depth of their actual pain; or it can be way for survivors to mask their embarrassment or shame. Some survivors can hold deep-seated feelings of self-blame or they may have inaccurate beliefs of their role in the trauma. Laughter can serve as a distraction to reduce further exploration of the experience. For general information on this topic, refer to: United Nations Trauma-Informed Investigations Field Guide, New York: United Nations, 2021, 2104429-trauma-informed_investigations _field_guide_web_0.pdf (un.org); See also, Lisa Ferentz, “Why Clients Smile When Talking About Trauma – Part 1: What are the reasons for this confusing phenomenon?,” Psychology Today, September 4, 2015, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/healing-trauma-s-wounds/201509/why-clients-smile-when-talking-about-trauma-part-1.
Interviewee: Sou Yim
Interviewer: Youk Chhang
Date: February 19, 2023
