In 1975, in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Sokanha Prak assumed the role of mother, father, and protector to her 1-, 3-, and 4-year-old siblings. Fending for them and herself in the countryside, the 6-year-old had no choice. Sokanha’s parents had been ripped from them by the Khmer Rouge, a Chinese Communist-backed military force intent on creating a faux-utopian society built on deprivation, thought control, and, when necessary, execution. Equipped only with a child’s mind and body, she worked herself to exhaustion, hour by hour, knowing that her captors could take all of their lives at any moment.
Today, 9,000 miles from the site of the Southeast Asian detention camp that smacked of the Nazi Holocaust, Sokanha, 53, now calls herself Amanda—in Latin, “worthy of love”—at the suggestion of a friend she met as a teen. It’s an altogether fitting moniker: when she was born, her umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck, and a midwife saved her life—only for her to face the terrors of totalitarianism in childhood….