1975 Richard Heng, aged five, entered one of a network of Khmer Rouge camps at Sadao in western Cambodia. He emerged at the age of ten, having worked under the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge for five long arduous years. Those years have been described by other witnesses as “the open cell”. There was no education in the camp. Each and every day the morning began with propaganda and patriotic songs blasted out from loudspeakers that ringed the makeshift parade ground, followed by grueling forced labour in the surrounding cotton fields: twelve hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year. This is the remarkable story of Richard and his entire family’s survival; first in the Khmer Rouge camps and then as refugees for three years along the Thai Cambodia border.
