One woman’s mission to save Cambodia Story by Jeanne Malmgren Photos by Jamie Francis of the Times Staff

ONE DAY SOPHIE SETS OUT to visit the house in which she was born. She lived there for nine years, until the April morning in 1975 when Khmer Rouge tanks rumbled into town and changed her world forever.

Two of her cousins, who still live in Phnom Penh, come along to help her find it. They head to the east side of town and turn down a dirt street with small stilt houses on either side, each behind a wall topped with barbed wire.

Sophie is looking for a coconut palm her father planted in their tiny lot. They stop at a corrugated metal gate. The address is painted in white: No. 38, Str. 272. There is no palm tree, but Sophie recognizes the lattice brick wall.

"I used to peek through this wall all the time," she says, awestruck. She pushes open the gate.

Inside is a courtyard no bigger than a two-car garage. Several people sit on a low bench in the shade of the house. Sophie greets them in Khmer.

Yes, there was a coconut palm in the corner, they tell her. We cut it down.

Sophie looks around in wonder. The last time she saw this place, she was 9 years old and a Khmer Rouge soldier with a rifle was shouting at her.

"This is where it all began," she says softly. "The whole nightmare."

In a village near Siem Reap, Sophie gives away new clothes to boys playing beside a rice paddy. After this photo was taken, each child got a Tootsie Pop. Most had never seen such a treat. Sophie also met a mother of seven whose daughter had a fever. She gave her some Children’s Tylenol and told her how to use it, translating the instructions on the box into Khmer.

As Sophie and her parents joined the ocean of humans evacuating Phnom Penh that day, they had no idea what to expect. The Khmer Rouge told everyone they had to leave the city because the United States was about to bomb it. You can come back in three days, they promised. People grabbed bags of clothing, canned food, important papers. They left on foot.

Soldiers with guns and megaphones prodded them along. With 3-million people clogging the streets, it took hours to reach the edge of the city. Anyone who defied the soldiers' orders or was too weak to continue was shot. Sophie saw corpses along the road.

That night the refugees looked back and saw the city on fire. The Khmer Rouge had torched it.

Now, 25 years later, Sophie stands and looks down the street a long time. She says nothing.

Riding back to her hotel, she sees emaciated dogs picking through piles of garbage in the street. Prostitutes stand in doorways, small children clinging to their legs.

"It makes me sad to see my country like this," Sophie says. "So much damage done in four years. They just wrecked everything."

Despite an amnesty law passed in 1994, the United States and other Western nations are pressuring the Cambodian government to bring former Khmer Rouge leaders to trial. Sophie envisions a different kind of justice.

"I hope those men burn in hell. I really do," she says.

THE NEXT DAY, Sophie journeys again into Cambodia's dark history. Tuol Sleng, a cluster of concrete buildings, was a prison where supposed enemies of the Khmer Rouge were tortured and killed. Sophie was never held here, but between 1975 and 1978, almost 20,000 people were. Seven came out alive. This is Cambodia's Auschwitz.

Sophie wanders through the ghostly cells of Tuol Sleng, where desperate prisoners were kept between torture sessions. On one mortar wall, she finds a message scratched in Khmer: “It’s very painful.” The prison has been left just as Vietnamese soldiers found it when they invaded Cambodia on Christmas Day in 1978

At the gate a sign announces: Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide. $2 Foreigners.

The attendant looks at Sophie in her spotless white athletic shoes and shorts, her Calvin Klein T-shirt.

"Two dollars," the woman says, in English.

"I thought Cambodians are free," Sophie says.

"Only on weekends," the attendant answers.

It is Sophie's first hint that she no longer fits in here, doesn't look Cambodian to her fellow countrymen. She frowns and hands the woman two $1 bills.

In the courtyard, birds sing and plumeria trees drop white flowers on the grass. The first building is a series of individual cells. Each room contains only a rusty metal bed. Between torture sessions, prisoners were kept here, chained naked to the beds.

In the next building, the walls are lined with black-and-white photographs of unsmiling people, all with numbers pinned to their shirts. For unknown reasons, the Khmer Rouge meticulously documented every prisoner who entered Tuol Sleng.

Some of the people in the pictures look numb or confused; others are wide-eyed with terror. Many are handcuffed. A few have bruises and black eyes. Most were executed minutes after their pictures were taken.

Sophie spins slowly in the center of the room, surrounded by all the faces. Her own face crumples. Tears run down her cheeks. Years ago, before these buildings were turned into a prison, they had a benign purpose.

If Sophie hadn't lost her childhood, she would have gone to high school here.

OUTSIDE THE PRISON, beggars approach Sophie as she climbs into the minivan. "Madame, madame," they hiss, waving empty hats in her direction. Each is missing an arm or a leg, sometimes both.

One, leaning on a homemade crutch, says his name is Hen Bunteun. He is 31. One day in 1983 he followed his brother into the jungle and stepped on a land mine. His left leg was ripped off above the knee.

About 6-million land mines still lurk underground in Cambodia, most of them in rural farming areas. Clearing efforts are slow and underfunded. As many as 75 people a month are injured or killed.

Like most of the country's 40,000 land mine amputees, Bunteun receives no government assistance. He panhandles at the gates of Tuol Sleng seven days a week. A good day's take is about $3.

Sophie opens her waist pack and gives him a fistful of Cambodian riel notes. It is barely enough to buy a cup of tea or a pack of cigarettes.

He presses his palms together and bows.