One man's quest for truth after a genocidal regime killed his family is the haunting focus of The Elimination by acclaimed documentarian Rithy Panh and translated from the French by John Cullen.Panh was just a teenager when the Khmer Rouge stormed into Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, in April 1975. Originally published in 2014, this edition includes a new introduction where Panh relates how his country experienced "a radical transformation and a radical suffering" for four horrific years that saw the deaths of an entire class of humanity in the killing fields of Cambodia.
In his graphic account of the evil perpetrated against the "new people" (i.e., the educated middle class), Panh decodes and deconstructs the ingenuous ways the Khmer regime rationalized mass murder, best embodied by the man known as "Comrade Duch," the dissembling commandant of Security Prison 21, or S-21. The narrative moves seamlessly from Panh's severe experiences of survival to his interview decades later with Duch for a documentary, Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell. The snippets of the q&a between Duch and Panh juxtapose the incongruity of the Khmer Rouge's pursuit of "pure ideas" against the utter depravity and moral filth it spawned.
In his interviews, Duch is a mild-mannered, educated cipher who talks, laughs, and lies. In his repeated denials of torture and murder, "Duch wants to believe that redemption can be bought with words," Panh notes. As this harrowing autobiography reveals, it cannot. Citing works by other genocide survivors throughout, Panh bequeaths the world an intimate yet universal rumination on the nature of humanity and evil not soon forgotten. -- Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver