Sydney Schanberg obituary 1934-1016

Sadly, I'm just learning about the work of Sydney Schanberg through his obituary.  I regret never having the opportunity to meet him, because I certainly would have appreciated a conversation about Cambodia.

As the evil dictator Pol Pot's Maoist guerrillas closed in on Phnom Penh in the spring of 1975, Sydney Schanberg's editors at The New York Times instructed him to leave the Cambodian capital. The veteran war journalist ignored the order and together with his Cambodian interpreter Dith Pran, he continued reporting.  

Within days of the Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge seizing the capital city, Dith would be expelled to the contryside, along with millions of other educated and urban Cambodians- the start of Pol Pot's genocidal attempt to creat an agrarian utopia. 

Schanberg won a Pulitzer for his reports on the Khmer Rouge and Dith's remarkable survival story, which inspired the 1984 film, "The Killing Fields".  Dith's mission, "was to tell the world what suffering his people were going through," he wrote. "It became my mission too."

Killing Fields journalist Sydney Schanberg dies at 82- BBCNews

US journalist Sydney Schanberg, whose reporting inspired the Oscar-winning Hollywood film, The Killing Fields,  died at the age of 82, the New York Times reports.

Schanberg worked for the Times and won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge in 1975.

His colleague, Dith Pran, was unable to leave and his four-year ordeal inspired Schanberg's work.

Sydney Schanberg 1934-2916 died in Poughkeepsie NY

Schanberg died in Poughkeepsie after a heart attack earlier in the week.

His death was confirmed by Charles Kaiser, a friend and former Times reporter, the paper said.

In 1980, Schanberg described his Cambodian colleague's ordeal of torture and starvation at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in a magazine article, and later a book called The Death and Life of Dith Pran.

Oscar awards

Pictures of some of the victims of the Khmer Rouge reign of terror

In 1975, Schanberg and Dith Pran ignored directives from Times editors to evacuate and stayed in Cambodia as almost all Western diplomats and journalists fled.

Born in Clinton, Massachusettes, Schanberg joined the Times as a copy boy in 1959, and "rose quickly  through the organization," said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.) He reported on the civil war in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971, and met Dith a year later while covering the US bombing of North Vietnamese sanctuaries inside Camobida.  Four years after the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, "there was no news of Dith," said The New York Times.  Racked with guild, Schangergtook time off to write about his experiences and to help Dith's wife and children to settle in the US. 

Then, in 1979, word arrived that Dith had escaped to a refugee camp in Thailand. He had endured unimaginable hardship, surviving beatings, back breaking labor, and a diet of insects, rodants and as litle as a tablespoon of rice a day.  

Schanberg immediately flew to Thailand and arranged for his friend to move to the US. Dith died in 2008.

The Khmer Rouge was the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, during which time, it was responsible for one of the worst mass killings of the 20th Century. The genocide claimed the lives of more than a million people - some estimates say up to 2.5 million.

Under the Maoist leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge tried to take Cambodia back to the Middle Ages, forcing millions of people from the cities to work on communal farms in the countryside.

But the attempt at social engineering had a terrible cost, and whole families died from execution, starvation, disease and overwork.

Schanberg began writing a column about New York City for the Times, in 1981, said The Washington Post. But, the "abrasive, headstrong manner" that had served him well overseas led to clashes with his bosses, and his column was canceled in 1985. Schanberg went on to write for other outlets and became a mentor to young journalists, but he never turly got over the horrors of Cambodia. "You tell yourself things in order to function, but you're going to break down," he said.  

"Eventually, you need to find room where you can sit alone and cry."