Tag: Dith Pran

  • The Interpreter of Memories From The Killing Fields

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    By Elizabeth Becker

    So how did Dith Pran, a sophisticated journalist, survive when the Khmer Rouge was rooting out and killing most intellectuals?

    A Cambodian banker I know survived by playing the village idiot. Pran survived by reading character. His brilliance as a journalist for figuring out chaotic situations in war was critical during the revolution. He, of course, hid his background, but he read people the way he had read all of us, foreigner and Cambodian alike. He knew what we were good for and where we were hopeless. During the Khmer Rouge revolution, he had to rely on those finely honed instincts to survive.

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  • Dith Pran, ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65

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    Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J.

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  • Legendary Photojournalist Dith Pran Battling Cancer

    Dith Pran, who survived torture under the genocidal Khmer Rouge after helping The New York Times’s Cambodia correspondent for three years, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January. He was hospitalized for three weeks starting in mid-February, and was released to the Roosevelt Care Center in Edison, NJ, on Friday.

    After escaping his country in 1979, Dith, 65, became a photographer for The New York Times in 1980, where he remains on staff. [His given name is Pran; Dith is his family name.] He was made famous by the 1984 film “The Killing Fields,” which depicts him in his role as a translator and journalist assisting Sydney Schanberg, then a foreign correspondent for The Times.

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