Strangers in Black

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This is a novel about a young boy’s struggle to survive the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It is a graphic and horrific account of what befalls Mok and his family when Pol Pot’s regime ousts the corrupt president Lon Nol. At first the people of Cambodia are happy, but their joy ends quickly when they discover that the Khmer Rouge are brutal assassins who beat, starve, and force even young children to work in inhumane conditions, all while spewing propaganda that they are serving a greater good.

Mok is nine years old when the atrocities begin, and through persistence, incredible courage, and luck, he survives one of the most barbaric episodes in the last half of the twentieth century. On page after page, readers are led into the increasingly desperate plight of Mok and to an understanding of the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge and the enormity of what took place in Cambodia.

This true story describes young Mok’s experiences of the grinding pains of hunger, debilitating disease, forced labor, separated families, and massacres. An epilogue tells us that his family finally made it to a refugee camp in Thailand and thereafter was sponsored to enter the U.S. to begin a new life in Oklahoma.