Customer Reviews

To the End of Hell

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This book is the testimony of a young Franco-Vietnamese lady in her early thirties who is dragged, along with her family, into the hell of the Khmer Rouges revolution back in April 1975. With her family (husband, daughter, son and close relatives), she's forced into leaving Phnom Penh to get to the countryside, along with hundreds of thousands of Phnom Penh inhabitants. In the span of a mere few days, she finds herself drawn from a routine, enjoyable life with lots of references and a defined position in her society, into a daily struggle for survival that decimates the ones she loves, one by one. Sounds like a good action/survival plot to you? Well, make no mistakes, it's actually a REAL testimony...

Denise Affonco's narration covers her survival and so called "life" across the whole Khmer Rouges' obnoxious reign, from 1975 to the Vietnamese liberation in 1979. This alone makes the whole book very interesting. It reads like a novel, well and cleanly written -I read the French version of it. As surprising or horrifying as some of the scenes might be, they're true. Unfortunately.

Although hers is no isolated case, with plenty of Cambodians having already told, written or shown the story of their survival in cinema (Killing Fields, S21 etc.), her book is a vivid narration of this nightmarish communist rule, as well as a marvelous testimony of human resistance and adaptation in the face of sheer horror. It is a text-book illustration of the power of hope and free will. Imprisoning someone's body is one thing, imprisoning someone's mind is another. True freedom is in our mind, that's one of this book's main messages.

With the last senior Khmer Rouges' progressive return to oblivion (thank God!), her book resonates even louder. This recollection of tragic events must be seen as a deeply humane testimony against forgetting the extent of the horror that human beings were once capable of achieving, as well as a formidable account of human grandeur in the face of extreme adversity.

This is an extremely well-crafted account of survival during Kampuchea's Pol Pot Regime. While often painful to read, it represents some of the best memoir writing on this particular place and time and offers a somewhat atypical point of view because the author is not Cambodian.

Denise Affonço was born in Phnom Penh of a French-Indian father and a Vietnamese mother. Well-educated and fluent in French, English and Vietnamese (she learned Khmer during the Khmer Rouge years), she describes an experience that typifies the era: backbreaking physical labor, inhuman living conditions, brutality and starvation. What sets this account apart from the 15 other memoirs of this period that I've read is Affonço's careful, delicate prose and her crystal clear elaboration of the story. The author has taken pains to place her experience within the greater context of events of the period, which she does without belaboring the history; instead footnotes sprinkled throughout the book keep us informed of political and social trends that affected her survival. But more importantly, this is no mere recounting of events: Affonço does a magnificent job of describing her own emotional anguish as her life is stripped down to the bare elements of survival, and her son and daughter are exposed to the horrors of hunger and danger at the hands of their heartless Khmer Rouge guards.

The most poignant moment comes when Affonço's 9-year-old daughter Jeanie dies of starvation. Rendered in painful detail, this death is portrayed both tenderly and cruelly, imbued with a bereaved mother's endless agony and remorse. Affonço owes her decision to go on surviving after this to her son, who had apparently rejected her but was only pretending in order to conform to Khmer Rouge policies.

Hunger was the cruelest torture inflicted on the victims of Pol Pot's madness, and Affonço does not spare us the obsessive nature of her suffering. Her daily search for anything to eat in order to stave off death is almost elegant in its horrifying intensity:

"I am tormented, tortured by hunger--yes, I call this a slow-burning torture, a death sentence by degrees, because who could ever have imagined that men such as these Khmer Rouge could be perverted enough to watch us die of hunger without so much as lifting a little finger! I have no self-respect left...what pride can be left in me when I go as far as to compete with animals for their food?" (p. 130)

Affonço was at death's door when the Vietnamese invaded Kampuchea in early 1979, but she made her way to Siem Reap and found employment as a translator. She expresses immense gratitude to a Vietnamese doctor who showed compassion and kindness to her--in contrast to almost everyone else at that time who reviled the Vietnamese. Arriving in France in 1980, she was told to keep her gratitude to herself.

Altogether this is a highly readable book, rich in historical detail in addition to being a marvelously human story of survival. Affonço is a keen observer and a skillful writer. Sadly, the translation is often clumsy with occasional grammatical errors and misused words. All the same, Affonço's gift for narrative shines through and the reader is treated to a vivid and unnerving portrait of hell.