- Dith Pran
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▪ 2009Cambodian photojournalist and interpreterborn Sept. 27, 1942, Siemréab, Camb.died March 30, 2008, New Brunswick, N.J.was the real-life model for the central character in the film The Killing Fields (1984), based on the 1980 article “The Death and Life of Dith Pran” by New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg. Dith acted as Schanberg's assistant (1972–75) as they covered the Cambodian civil war, and when the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, he risked his life to save Schanberg and other Western journalists, who then failed in their attempt to get him out of the country with them. He was taken prisoner, tortured, and put to work as a farm labourer, nearly starving in conditions of virtual slavery. In early 1979 Dith was liberated by invading Vietnamese forces, but after returning home he learned that some 50 members of his family had died in the Khmer “killing fields.” Concerned that he was still in danger because he had worked with the Americans, he fled. On Oct. 3, 1979, after walking through the jungle for more than three months, he emerged in Thailand and sent word to Schanberg, who had been trying to find his friend for more than four years. Dith joined the New York Times staff as a photojournalist in 1980 and in 1994 founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project. He became a U.S. citizen in 1986.
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Universalium. 2010.
