TEN STORIES FROM THE KILLING FIELDS
By Don Cormack
Dictum Press. 108 pages. £5.99
ISBN 978 1 915 934 246
Fifty years after the publication of Killing Fields, Living Fields, this book retells ten of the moving tales in that book for a new audience.
Written by a serving missionary in Cambodia at the time of the Khmer Rouge atrocities, the accounts document the brutality of the regime as well as how the gospel brought hope and inspired amazing endurance in the lives of those caught up in those appalling events.
It records how God prepared the nation for suffering by sending a gifted young man, Major Taing Chhirc, to plead with a congregation at the Keswick Convention to share the gospel, which had been known in this country for centuries, by sending support to Cambodia to make this good news widely known there.
The author, Don Cormack, responded to the challenge. The light of the gospel shone brightly for a short time before the darkness of Pol Pot’s regime descended. He recounts the sequence of events which caused the mass expulsion of citizens from their homes and the subsequent misery of those sacrifices. The stories, set against the backdrop of unbelievable cruelty and hard-heartedness, are by turns poignant, heroic, heartbreaking and triumphant, and demonstrate how God can strengthen and sustain people through unimaginable horrors and how His mercy can extend even to the perpetrators of such violence.
The book is definitely not easy to read, but the stories are inspiring and cause the reader to give thanks to the God who can enable His followers to endure by seeing Him who is invisible. Memorable they certainly are: one story has stayed with this reviewer ever since the first reading all those years ago.
The addition of a section in which Cormack reflects on his experience, and offers a moving choice to his readers about who to follow, rounds off this stirring book. The historical timeline of the events is also useful. I left the book challenged and awe-struck with the testimonies outlined but also wanting to know how the church is faring in Cambodia today.
