Killing Fields survivor Dith Pran dead

Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country8217;s murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries...

Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country8217;s murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film The Killing Fields, died on Sunday, colleague Sydney Schanberg said. Dith, 65, died at a New Jersey hospital Sunday morning of pancreatic cancer, according to Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times.

Dith was working as an interpreter and assistant for Schanberg in Phnom Penh, when the Vietnam War reached its chaotic end in April 1975 and both countries were taken over by Communist forces. Schanberg helped Dith8217;s family get out but was forced to leave his friend behind after the capital fell; they were not reunited until Dith escaped four and a half years later. Eventually, Dith resettled in the US and went to work as a photographer for the Times.

It was Dith himself who coined the term 8220;killing fields8221; for the horrifying clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered on his desperate journey to freedom. 8220;That was the phrase he used from the very first day, during our wondrous reunion in the refugee camp,8221; Schanberg said later.

With thousands being executed simply for manifesting signs of intellect or Western influence, Dith survived by masquerading as an uneducated peasant, toiling in the fields and subsisting on as little as a mouthful of rice a day, and whatever small animals he could catch.

After Dith moved to the US, he became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, dedicated to educating people on the history of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Schanberg described Dith8217;s ordeal and salvation in a 1980 magazine article titled The Death and Life of Dith Pran. Later a book, the magazine article became the basis for The Killing Fields, the highly successful 1984 British film starring Sam Waterston as the Times correspondent and Haing S. Ngor, another Cambodian escapee from the Khmer Rouge, as Dith Pran. The film won three Oscars, including the best supporting actor award for Ngor.

Dith spoke of his illness in a March interview with The Star-Ledger of Newark, saying he was determined to fight against the odds and urging others to get tested for cancer. 8220;I want to save lives, including my own, but Cambodians believe we just rent this body,8221; he said. 8220;It is just a house for the spirit, and if the house is full of termites, it is time to leave.8221;