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...surrender of the city, Red Cross authorities had tried to convert the Hotel Le Phnom into a protected international zone. But at 5 p.m. on the day of the takeover, Khmer Rouge troops ordered the hotel evacuated within 30 minutes. Hundreds of foreigners fled to the French embassy compound; most of them remained there for 13 days, while fires and shooting broke out sporadically in the fallen city...
...scene within the compound, where about 1,300 foreigners and Cambodians sought shelter, was one of deprivation, acrimony and tedium. There was no running water, and food was limited. Though the Khmer Rouge guards stole a few watches and other valuables, they generally treated the foreigners correctly if sternly. As the days passed, one baby was born, another died. When the seven Russian diplomats arrived from their abandoned embassy, they were loaded down with huge supplies of tinned meat and vodka. They refused to share the goods with the other inmates, thereby becoming the bitter tar gets of Westerners...
...most heartbreaking moment, the journalists reported, came when the Khmer Rouge ordered the 500 Cambodians in the group to leave the compound and join the peasant revolution. Wives were separated from husbands, husbands from families. About 150 Montagnards, the mountain tribesmen from Viet Nam, also had to leave. One of them told American Businessman Douglas Sapper that since he had fought with them in Viet Nam, he was their blood brother. A Montagnard officer's wife pressed the American to take her five-day-old baby, asking him to raise it. "They asked me for help I couldn...
...thought we were finished." Luckily Dith Pran, a Cambodian employee of the Times, was able to talk the troops into freeing them. Schanberg got back to the Hotel Le Phnom just as it was being invaded by troops; he packed his bags and sprinted to the French embassy compound -his home for the next 13 days...
...many as 1,300 refugees were crowded into the compound, and it was not long before many of the foreigners began squabbling over the little food and few comforts available. That dissension continued up to the end of their three-day journey by truck to Thailand. Concluded Schanberg: "If the Communists were looking for reasons to expel us as unfit and unsuited to live in a simple Asian society, we gave them ample demonstration...