By Rithy Panh with Christophe Bataille, 2013

The Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh lived through the Khmer Rouge nightmare as a boy between the ages of 13 and 17. In this book scenes of his boyhood are interspersed with adult commentary about and interviews with Comrade Duch as a prisoner on trial. Duch was the commander of a prison where thousands were tortured and killed.

It is difficult to understand why Duch allowed Rithy Panh such access. Perhaps it was to break up the tedium of life in a prison much more humane than the one Duch ran, perhaps it was to justify himself. In fact the words coming out of his mouth utterly condemn him. He shows no compassion for his victims and no understanding of his actions. He is not haunted by his crimes and he never dreams of his victims. His conversion to evangelical Christianity seems to have made him more rather than less comfortable with his sins.

Rithy Panh embarks on this project not to understand—it’s pretty clear he feels the actions of Duch and other Khmer Rouge are beyond understanding—but to know what happened. In Rithy Panh’s words, “I didn’t try to understand Duch, nor did I care to judge him; I wanted to give him a chance to explain, in detail, the death process of which he was the organizer-in-chief. “

The future filmmaker was the youngest of nine children in a close, loving, bourgeois family whose world was destroyed by the Khmer Rouge. The world of his family was essentially eliminated, and this may be reflected in the title of the book. Also, it is by the process of elimination that he arrives at the hollow core of Comrade Duch.

Rithy Panh credits his survival to enormous luck and also to his in-between age. During these years he was not an adult but not so young that he was going to be among the first to starve to death (as a young niece and nephew were). In a story with many unbelievably ghastly details, the most horrific parts are his descriptions of burying dead bodies. These were the bodies of patients in a hospital where practically none of the staff had any medical training.

Medicine was one of the things the Khmer Rouge believed had been mystified by the bourgeoisie who guarded their bit of knowledge for class reasons. Anybody who had any specialized knowledge had to hide it or be exposed as a class enemy. Illiterate peasants were given the most rudimentary medical training and let loose as doctors

The death rate in the hospital where Rithy Panh worked was close to one hundred percent. Sanitation standards were so low that he probably would eventually have died of some infection from handling the bodies or simply being in this setting had he not been transferred to work on a duck farm with another boy. Although the boys were not allowed to eat any of their charges, this transfer saved their lives.

This book seems to cover a lot of the same ground as First They Killed My Father by Luong Ung, the memoir that forms the basis for an upcoming Netflix film by Angelina Jolie. Both are by writers who lived through the Khmer Rouge years as children. Rithy Panh and Jolie are collabarating on the film, which will be draw on the experiences of a number of child survivors.

In fact, First They Killed My Father and The Elimination are very different books. Luong Ung’s story ends in her living the American dream. There is no such resolution for Rithy Panh. He is reunited in France in 1979 with the remnants of his family and makes a life for himself there, always with the shadow of history looming. He alternates trips to Cambodia for as long as he can bear being there with restorative time in France. “The bloodbath has drowned part of me” eloquently sums up his life as a survivor.