SydneySchanberg
Foreign correspondent whose work inspired the film The Killing Fields
HI S E L E C T R I F Y I NG reports from a Cambodia on the brink of destruction had a cinematic quality, with helicopters “dropping from the skies” and “stonyfaced marines armed to the teeth”. Sydney Schanberg’s passionate, unsparing chronicling of the country’s human tragedy alerted the world to the horror that was unfolding in Cambodia’s killing fields, and formed the basis for an Oscar-winning movie.
Yet the man who would become one of the top foreign correspondents of his time had fallen into journalism almost by accident. Sydney Hillel Schanberg was born in Clinton, Massachussets, the son of Freda (née Feinberg) and Louis Schanberg, who ran a local grocery store. The family was not well off but Sydney won a scholarship to Harvard. He graduated in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in American history and absolutely no idea what to do next.
After a few fruitless attempts, including a three-month stint at law school, he wasdraftedandworkedasareporterfor an army newspaper in Frankfurt. Talking to soldiers made him understand, he would later say — “what was meant when people talk about liberty, honour and courage” — and meeting newsmen covering the Cold War tickled his interest in war reporting. Back in the US, he endedupworkingforthe as a copy boy but quickly progressed to staff reporter and then bureau chief in charge of government reporting.
He joined the foreign desk in 1969 and, as bureau chief in India in 1971, he covered its 13-day war with Pakistan. The previous year, while covering the Vietnam War, he visited Cambodia, which would become central to his work and his life. After being made southeast Asia correspondent his visits became more frequent. He sensed that the story of “a little country being overrun by a war and nobody in the world giving a hoot” was important and so he kept returning to Cambodia until his editors gave him free rein.
By then Schanberg had met the man who would become his translator, sidekick and brother-in-arms, Dith Pran. Together they covered the rise of the Khmer Rouge from peasant army to merciless mass murderers.
By April 1975 the Khmer Rouge were close to the capital Phnom Penh. Most of the foreign press and embassy staff were being evacuated but Pran and Schanberg chose to stay behind. Schanberg organised for Pran’s family to be flown to the US but, ever the risk-taker, he decided he was not going to “sit in Bangkok covering the rest of the war”. It was, he later admitted, a very bad call. He had misjudged the situation because of his distrust in the US authorities’ message, but primarily because he mistakenly believed that, having achieved victory, the Khmer Rouge would end the brutality he had so often described.
Instead, the horror was just beginning. Schanberg had the grim task of chronicling the final onslaught, the uprooting of millions, the mass executions that were supposed to lead to a “peasant revolution”. In his last dispatch he noted the mainly teenage soldiers: “They are universally grim, robot-like, brutal. Weapons drip from them like fruit from trees — grenades, pistols, rifles, rockets.”
Taken to the banks of Mekong and threatened with execution himself, Schanberg was spared, thanks to Pran’s pleas. The two sheltered in the French Embassy but the American was unable to stop his friend being expelled from the compound. Pran was forced to join the masses of Cambodians taken to the countryside to achieve the Khmer Rouge’s murderous agrarian utopia.
From the truck evacuating him Schanberg observed, and later reported, the desperate exodus: “Two million people suddenly moved out of the city in stunned silence — walking, bicycling, pushing cars that had run out of fuel, covering the roads like a human carpet. A once-throbbing city became an echo chamber of silent streets lined with abandoned cars and gaping, empty shops.”
Back in New York and unable to discover Pran’s fate, Schanberg fell into a deep depression. Although he returned to the and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his writing on Cambodia in 1976, it was not until April 18, 1979 that his mood lifted, when an East German correspondent sent him a message from Pran.
Schanberg eventually located him in a Thai refugee camp and flew there to bring him back to the US where he secured him a job as a photographer with the He finally felt able to write about their joint experiences in Cambodia. was published in the
in 1980, forming the basis of the 1984 Oscar-winning movie
By then Schanberg was metropolitan editor of the but a conflict with the publisher saw him leave the paper after 26 years. He moved on to where he continued writing on issues relevant to ordinary people and mentored many young reporters.
Sydney Schanberg married Janice Sakofsky in 1967 but the marriage ended in divorce. In 1995 he married Jane Freiman who survives him together with two daughters, Jessica and Rebecca, from his first marriage. He died of a heart attack in New York, aged 82. Sydney Schanberg was born on January 17, 1934. He died on July 9.