Thursday, 14 February 2008

Genocides haunt survivors

Kevin Butler, Staff Writer
02/13/2008

LONG BEACH - Phansy Peang lost her family, including her children, during the massacres of the Khmer Rouge in her native Cambodia.

Years later, Peang, 60, still is haunted and suffers depression, occasionally dreaming of her children that perished.

"It's lucky for me that I can see them in my dreams," she said.

Peang was among three survivors of genocidal regimes that shared their harrowing stories during a panel discussion Wednesday, part of a human rights forum at Cal State Long Beach.

The three-day President's Forum on International Human Rights, which concluded Wednesday, focused on "Modern Genocides and Global Responsibility."

Mariana Francisco, a Mayan woman who survived mass killings in Guatemala in the 1980s, described how she witnessed tortures and executions while serving as a nurse in her native country.

At least 200,000 Guatemalans died or disappeared as a result of the military's effort to suppress the Mayan population, whom government officials accused of harboring communist sympathies during a civil war.

When she was 8, she witnessed her brother's kidnapping by troops to force him to join the army, she said.

Some boys from Mayan villages who were conscripted into the army later wielded weapons against their indigenous community, she said.

Lillian Black, who spent seven months as a prisoner in the Nazi-run Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, described how her family was forcibly moved to a ghetto and then placed into crowded train cars.

Upon arriving at the concentration camp, Nazi guards separated the passengers into two lines - in one stood her parents, in the other Black and her sister.

Black and her sister, who also survived, never saw their parents again.

The Nazi guards cut off her hair, gave her clothes and wooden shoes and later made her break stones as a slave laborer.

Early on in her time in the camp, Black, then 14 years old, did not realize mass executions were occurring.

She asked another person in the camp what had happened to her parents.

"She said, `Do you really want to know? Look over there where the fires are. That's where they are,"' Black said.

Black, 77, transferred to another camp and liberated by the U.S. military, said she has struggled with feelings of guilt at having survived. Her distress once caused her to visit a psychiatrist.

"He said, `You know, you have a right to live, it's OK,"' she said.

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