'Anne Frank' Resonates for Cambodian Readers

Tibor Krausz
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia

As a young girl in the early 1990s, Sayana Ser often spent the night cowering in fear with her family in an underground shelter her father had dug beneath their home on the outskirts of this capital city.

Outside, marauding bands of Khmer Rouge guerrillas battled it out with government forces. Meanwhile, brutal mass murder was still fresh on civilians' minds.

A decade later, as a 19-year-old scholarship student in the Netherlands, Sayana chanced upon the memoirs of another girl who had feared for her life in even more dire circumstances.

It was The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, the precocious Jewish teenager who hid from the Nazis in occupied Amsterdam until her family's hiding place was discovered and she was sent to her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

"While reading the book I couldn't hold my tears back," Sayana recalls. "I wondered how Anna must have felt and how she could bear it."

Sayana Ser reads a copy of the Khmer translation of the "The Diary of a Young Girl."

Sayana now is the director of a student outreach and educational program at a Cambodian research institution that documents the Khmer Rouge genocide. Between 1975 and 1979, up to 2 million people -- a quarter of the population -- perished on Pol Pot's "killing fields" in one of the worst mass murders since the Holocaust.

Sayana, who wrote her master's thesis about "dark tourism," or touristic voyeurism at genocide sites in Cambodia and elsewhere, also visited several Holocaust memorials and death camps.

"I couldn't believe how one human being could do this to another, whether they were Jews or Khmers," she says.

On returning home, she sought permission to translate the Anne Frank diary into Khmer.

The Holocaust classic was published by the country's leading genocide research group, the Documentation Center of Cambodia. It is now available for Khmer students at high school libraries in Phnom Penh, alongside locally written books about the Khmer Rouge period. Such books include First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung, which recounts the harrowing experiences of a child survivor of the killing fields.

"I have seen many Anna Franks in Cambodia," says Youk Chhang, the head of the documentation center and Cambodia's foremost researcher on genocide.

A child survivor himself, Chhang lost siblings and numerous relatives in the mass murders perpetrated by Pol Pot and his followers.

"If we Cambodians had read her diary a long time ago," he says, "perhaps there could have been a way for us to prevent the Cambodian genocide from happening."

Although the story of Anne and her resilient optimism in the face of murderous evil has touched millions of readers around the world, it may particularly resonate with Cambodians, Sayana adds.

"Under Pol Pot, many children were separated from their families. They faced starvation and were sent to the front to fight and die," she explains. "Like Anna, they never knew peace and the warmth of a home."