The Elimination by Rithy Panh

Author:Rithy Panh [Panh, Rithy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-559-4
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2013-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

I study Louis Althusser’s For Marx and some of Étienne Balibar’s texts on Marx and historical materialism. The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt. Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality. Robert Antelme’s The Human Race. Charlotte Delbo’s trilogy Auschwitz and After. I watch hardly any films. I breathe the poems of René Char and Jacques Prévert.

I read some research works on Duch. I know the first and last names he was given at birth, then the ones a seer gave him at three months to ward off disease and evil spirits, and finally the one he chose himself when he was fifteen. I know that as a child Duch suffered from the harshness of his French teachers. I know that when he was twenty his bicycle was stolen, and that he was very offended. I know that he was madly in love with Kim Heng, whom he affectionately calls “my frangipani flower.” She elected to study literature; he chose mathematics. He begged her to choose the same field as he did. “Together, the two of us, with our teachers’ salaries—we would have been able to live quite decently,” he says. “We could have had an average lifestyle.” But those dreams came to nothing. Kim Heng refused. Lost love. Without saying her name Duch claims he still loves her. His throat is dry; he drinks a big glass of water and goes on, “Life is strange. I became a Khmer Rouge, but I could have been in Lon Nol’s clan. Then I would have been executed by the Khmer Rouge.” Lost in thought Duch rewrites his life.

Rapidly, one after another, his friends are thrown into jail by the secret police. Then he asks his “master” Sun Sen for permission to marry Rom, a woman of solid peasant background, “for class reasons.” I know a lot about that. I’d like to understand. To explain. I’m an innocent.

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