Life under the Khmer Rouge: Cambodian family who buried their past to ensure their future
- The Rama family buried their most prized possessions – family photographs – when the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in the 1970s
- Photographer Charles Fox has created a book filled with these retrieved photos, along with images of the family’s life in America
Vira Rama recalls watching his mother carefully stashing treasured family photos in a tarpaulin bag. Trembling with fear, she dug a hole beneath the small hut to which Khmer Rouge soldiers had relocated the family, and buried them among banana leaves, knowing that if she was caught she would be killed.
The photos – records of a past life that they, like many Cambodians, had to hide to stay alive – would remain there for the duration of communist leader Pol Pot’s reign from 1975 to 1979.
“I was only 10 or 11,” says Rama, “but I can vividly remember my parents talking about how if the Khmer Rouge found these pictures, they would reveal our background and we would be killed.”
Four decades on, this prized collection of family photographs form the basis of a book, Buried. Compiled by British photographer Charles Fox, who has been working in Cambodia since 2005, the collection of images documents the Rama family’s journey from pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia via refugee camps to their resettlement in the United States.
“We were told [by the Khmer Rouge soldiers] to pack a few belongings and to get ready to evacuate the city because the Americans would send their bombs,” recalls Rama, who now works as an engineer in Los Angeles.
