The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields

From the internationally acclaimed director of S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, a survivor’s breathtaking autobiography that grapples with the horrors of dictatorship and genocide, now with a new introduction.

Rithy Panh was only thirteen years old when the Khmer Rouge expelled his family from Phnom Penh in 1975. In the months and years that followed, his entire family was executed, starved, or worked to death.

Thirty years later, after having become a respected filmmaker, Rithy Panh decides to question one of the men principally responsible for the genocide, Comrade Duch, who’s neither an ordinary person nor a demon—he’s an educated organizer, a slaughterer who talks, forgets, lies, explains, and works on his legacy. This confrontation unfolds into an exceptional narrative of human history and an examination of the nature of evil.

The Elimination stands among the essential works that document the immense tragedies of the twentieth century, with Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and Elie Wiesel’s Night.

Rithy Panh is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker best known for S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. His documentary The Missing Picture, which was inspired by The Elimination, won the Prix Un Certain Regard at the 2013 Cannes International Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. His recent documentaries include Graves Without a Name, which was submitted as the Cambodian entry for the 2018 Oscars, and Irradiated, which competed for the Golden Bear at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.
 
Christophe Bataille is a French novelist. His works include the award-winning Annam, Hourmaster, and Absinthe. He has been an editor at Editions Grasset since 1997, writing by night. Since January 2007, he has supported Bibliothèques Sans Frontières (Libraries Without Borders) a young non-governmental organization devoted to helping to provide help in educating citizens of developing countries.

John Cullen (1942–2021) is the translator of many books from Spanish, French, German, and Italian, including Siegfried Lenz’s The Turncoat, Juli Zeh’s Empty Hearts, Patrick Modiano’s Villa Triste, Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, and Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck.