First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers – A conversation with Loung Ung

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The Ghetto Fighters’ House in partnership with the South African Holocaust & Genocide Foundation and Classrooms Without Borders invites you to a special ‘Talking Memory’ event.

Join Loung Ung to learn more about her life surviving the Khmer Rouge genocidal regime in Cambodia. Learn about her bestselling book “First They Killed My Father”, and the critically acclaimed 2017 Netflix Original Movie directed by Angelina Jolie based on her memoir.

Born in 1970 to a middle-class family in Phnom Penh, Loung Ung was only five years old when the Khmer Rouge Soldiers stormed into her city and her family was forced out of their home in a mass evacuation to the countryside. By 1978, the Khmer Rouge had killed Ung’s parents and two of her siblings. In 1980, she and her older brother escaped by boat to Thailand, where they spent five months in a refugee camp.

Loung’s first memoir, the national best-seller “First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers” (Harper Perennial), details her survival of Cambodia’s killing fields, one of the bloodiest episodes of the twentieth century. Some two million Cambodians — out of a population of just seven million — died at the hands of the infamous Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime. Of her family of nine, five survived.

Today, she has shared her messages of building resilience, healing from trauma, civic service, activism, and leadership in the U.S. and across the world.