About
Dith Pran was born on September 23, 1942, in Siem Reap, Cambodia. In the early 1970s, he worked as a translator and assistant to New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg, covering the Cambodian civil war. In April 1975, when Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, he was forced to stay behind while Western journalists were evacuated. He survived four years of forced labor, starvation, and torture by concealing his education and ties to Americans. He is credited with coining the term "killing fields" to describe the mass graves he encountered during his escape to Thailand in 1979. After reuniting with Schanberg, he moved to the United States and was hired as a photojournalist at The New York Times in 1980.
* 1942-09-23 — † 2008-03-28
Major works
- Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors (1997)memoir collection
Key milestones
- 1979Escapes from Cambodia and reaches Thailand, discovering mass graves that lead him to coin the term "killing fields."
- 1980Joins The New York Times as a photojournalist.
- 1994Founds the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project to educate the public about the Cambodian genocide.
Themes
survivalgenocidememoryphotographyhuman rights
Sources: nytimes.com · reuters.com · id.loc.gov