To The End Of Hell- Denise Affonço (2007)

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On a hot, dry day in April 1975, an army of young soldiers, heavily armed and dressed all in black, marched into Cambodia’s capital of Phnom Penh. Their arrival was greeted with applause and gifts from the population of the town, as it marked an end to a bloody five-year civil war between the US-backed regime of General Lon Nol who had come to power through a coup, and dissidents supporting the ousted ruler Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The Khmer Rouge party, a faction of the Communist Party of Kampuchea originating in the jungles of North-Eastern Cambodia, came to power through this void, with support of the Prince, by posing as a party for peace.

What ensued was to be genocide on an unprecedented scale in relation to the size of the small country.  Of a population of seven million, between a fifth and a third are estimated to have been wiped out by execution, torture, starvation, disease and forced labour as the Khmer Rouge set about ruthlessly trying to install a communist agrarian society.

On this April day, Denise Affonço was part of the crowds, watching the chilling scene with apprehension amidst the misplaced celebration. The next morning, along with the entire population of Phnom Penh, she was forced to evacuate and would never see her home again, being relocated to the countryside to begin four hellish years of forced labour.

Affonço’s memoir was born from an account of her ordeal that she was asked to write by Vietnamese authorities after their capture of Cambodia in 1979, ending four years of the Khmer Rouge’s Democratic Kampuchea. Her account was to be used as evidence in a show trial against the Khmer Rouge leaders Pol Pot and Ieng Sary in absentia. This first manuscript was never intended to be published. It was only twenty-five years later, living a new life in France, that Affonço spoke to an educated, so-called intellectual man who told her that the Khmer Rouge “only did good things” for Cambodia… and she realised her story had to be told.

It is precisely this poor general knowledge of the events of Cambodia’s recent history that make Denise Affonço’s memoir so important. The English translation, published by Reportage Press in 2007, is named To the End of Hell; the original French, published in 2005, carries a different name: La Digues Des Veuves. The name refers to an episode in her story in which a collection of women from the camp, including Affonço, were assigned to build a dyke. The husbands of all of these women had been taken away by Khmer Rouge officials in the first year of their imprisonment, for ‘re-education’. It was only three years later that the women were given a cruel indication of their husbands’ fate: at an indoctrination meeting, they were told that the dyke they had just finished building would be named ‘Widows’ Dyke’. 

Besides the execution of her husband, Affonço suffered the loss of her nine-year old daughter to starvation, along with her sister-in-law and three nieces. Her young nephew was killed for stealing food; of her extended family, only Affonço and her son survived this nightmare. Affonço buried her loved ones herself, in shallow graves in the forests surrounding their prison camp.

Affonço’s story is made all the more heart-breaking in that, unlike for the majority of Cambodians, her situation was avoidable: born to a French father and Vietnamese-Khmer mother, she was a French citizen and worked for the French Embassy in Phnom Penh. As all other foreigners fled in the month before the fall of the city, Affonço was encouraged to escape with her two children. But this would mean leaving her Chinese husband Seng behind. Affonço made the decision to stay put in order to keep her family together. Throughout her ordeal, she questioned whether her mother country was searching for its nationals- this was a hope that sustained her through the first years of her imprisonment.

In reality, the international community had little knowledge of the events that were unfolding within Cambodia, as its borders with Vietnam and Thailand were closed and lined with landmines. Nonetheless, the Khmer Rouge held a seat within the UN right up until 1993, under the name of Democratic Kampuchea until 1982, and then as part of a coalition government. Never was the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, the new state established by the invading Vietnamese, legally recognised as the government of Cambodia. Whether or not the motives of the Vietnamese were honourable is debatable, but Affonço pointedly recognises the help that the Vietnamese soldiers provided her with after she was freed from the camp. “All the survivors know very well to whom they owe their lives but most do not want to acknowledge it, nobody wants to say out loud what they all think to themselves,” she writes.

To The End of Hell is a powerful and moving memoir. Reading it, I am humbled by Affonço’s courage in recounting her story in such raw honesty- amongst other things, she remembers fighting with dogs for scraps of food and the act of cruelty she inflicted on her crying daughter, driven by the insane hunger that dehumanised her. Consider the pain it must have caused this woman to re-live such terrible memories and record them on page. Moreover, the book offers an important testament to the crimes of the Khmer Rouge and pays recognition to the Vietnamese soldiers who doubtlessly saved the lives of thousands of Cambodian people.

Finally, to understand the significance of Affonço’s memoir it is necessary to consider the context of the on-going trials of senior Khmer Rouge leaders. Only in 2005 was a body (the Extraordinary Chambers of the Cambodian Courts) established to try the leading figures and it has so far been riddled with setbacks including financial problems and controversy surrounding cases. Of the four cases that have been open, only one has led to a conviction. If the tribunal continues at such a slow rate, the people responsible for the Cambodian genocide will die as free men and women, as did Pol Pot, leader of the movement and Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea, in 1998, and the Khmer Rouge period will settle into the dusts of history without a glimpse of justice for victims and their families.

But writings such as Affonço’s will not let us forget this hideous and often misunderstood period of 20th Century history. I hope that more people will read Affonço’s story, and demand to know why the Khmer Rouge were sanctioned by the international community for so long, and, most importantly, why elements of it remain unchallenged within Cambodian society today.

More:

Read my account of visiting the Choeung Ek killing field and the Tuol Sleng prison museum in Phnom Penh

Read my review of After They Killed Our Father: A Refugee from the Killing Fields Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind