The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields [Paperback]

From the internationally acclaimed director of S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, a survivor’s breathtaking autobiography that grapples with the horrors of dictatorship and genocide, now with a new introduction.

Rithy Panh was only thirteen years old when the Khmer Rouge expelled his family from Phnom Penh in 1975. In the months and years that followed, his entire family was executed, starved, or worked to death.

Thirty years later, after having become a respected filmmaker, Rithy Panh decides to question one of the men principally responsible for the genocide, Comrade Duch, who’s neither an ordinary person nor a demon—he’s an educated organizer, a slaughterer who talks, forgets, lies, explains, and works on his legacy. This confrontation unfolds into an exceptional narrative of human history and an examination of the nature of evil.

The Elimination stands among the essential works that document the immense tragedies of the twentieth century, with Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and Elie Wiesel’s Night.“An unsettling, probing, morally urgent reflection on the Khmer Rouge years.” —New York Review of Books

“The power of The Elimination lies in the telling details Mr. Panh employs to describe the madness of these years, when the Khmer Rouge worked to destroy every vestige of individuality...a searing, firsthand account of the Cambodian genocide and as such an important contribution to the history of those years. It is also an examination of the nature of evil as told from the perspectives of a victim and a perpetrator.” —Wall Street Journal

“Like no other book,