At one o'clock in the afternoon, American journalist Sidney Schaumburg thought he was going to be executed.

Schoenberg, plus an American freelance photographer, a British journalist, their driver,

and a local journalist who also acted as Seanberg's translator, had just walked out of a group

of operating rooms in a hospital when they were surrounded by soldiers who started screaming at them.

The soldiers were from the totalitarian regime known as the Khmer Rouge. It was May of 1975.

The Khmer Rouge was beginning its takeover of Cambodia, and few people in the Western world were paying attention.

The final dramatic evacuation of Americans from Saigon had happened just two weeks earlier,

and by that time, the spring of

1975, the world had been saturated by 10 years of nonstop stories about the American War in

Vietnam. In the U.S., there was plenty of turmoil to dominate the headlines without reading

more about Southeast Asia. So, few people tuned in as the Khmer Rouge,

led by a vicious dictator named Pol Pot, took over Cambodia and began systematically killing

people. Over the course of four years, starting in the spring of 1975, the Khmer Rouge

killed between 1 million and 3 million people. On that afternoon in May,

Sidney Schaumburg of the New York Times thought he would be one of them. But the local translator,

Dith Prawn, saved Schoenberg's life and the lives of the others. Pran convinced the soldiers

to release the journalists before Pran himself was taken to a labor camp.

Five months later, Pran escaped the camp and made his way to Thailand, where he continued to raise awareness of the horrors happening in Cambodia.

Some of those horrors were the desolate areas in the countryside where soldiers shot and killed thousands of people

and dumped them in mass graves.

Cambodian journalist Dith Prawn is credited with calling those remote gravesites the killing fields.

A year later, in 1976, Sidney Schaumburg won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting

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