Teen Girl Barely Survived Genocide but ‘Lost Everything.’ She Rebuilt Her Life, Reunited Her Family and Found Her Voice

The Khmer Rouge broke Sambo Ly’s heart, but it never broke her spirit.

Now 65, Ly still feels her voice shake when she tries to describe what she endured as a teenager in Cambodia during the killing fields of the 1970s. Even after decades, some memories refuse to soften.

“Speaking in English, I don’t really feel emotional, but speaking in Cambodian is really tough,” Ly says. “You can go to school and learn a language, but it’s not the same.”

For Ly, English can carry information—but not always the full weight of grief, identity, or history. Her native language does. And so does dance.

Those two forms of expression—words and movement—have become the foundation of her life’s work: helping Cambodian immigrants in California reconnect with a culture the Khmer Rouge tried to erase.

Ly has worked as an interpreter and translator for about 40 years, including the last two decades managing and training others at Alameda Health System. She also founded Cambodian Community Development, Inc. in 1990, offering services from language classes to housing support, and later launched Cambodian Family and Children Services in 2016 from her home.

In her backyard in San Leandro, near San Francisco, she teaches dance and language to young Cambodians who want to understand their roots.

“It’s not just teaching dance, but teaching the culture behind it. Culture and language give us our identities,” Ly says. “I encourage them to be proud of who you are.”

She also uses her skills as a freelance translator to support victims of serious abuse, including child abuse and sex trafficking—cases she says have affected members of the Cambodian community. Some of the children she works with are very young. She listens, documents, and translates their statements so they can be understood within the legal system.

“I transcribe not just their voice, but their emotional pain so they can get justice in the court system,” she says.

A childhood stolen by the Khmer Rouge

Ly was a teenager in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge regime under Pol Pot began a four-year campaign of genocide that killed an estimated 2 million people—about a quarter of Cambodia’s population.

Families were forced into labor camps. Schools and temples became prisons. Fields turned into execution sites.

Ly rarely speaks in detail about her survival, but the fragments she shares are devastating. Her mother, Seang Kim Sao, worked as a midwife in a hospital before the family was driven from their home and forced into brutal conditions.

Ly remembers being made to scoop human feces with her bare hands to use as fertilizer in rice fields.

“I lost everything, including my identity and dignity as a human being,” she says.

She lived through starvation and disease, including malaria. Many in her family did not survive. Of 17 relatives who were forced to leave home together, only five lived.

During a two-month march to the farmlands, Ly recalls seeing corpses in the water and signs of destruction everywhere. Her three small cousins—just 2, 3, and 4 years old—couldn’t keep up. Sick and exhausted, they were taken away.

“We hear stories of children buried alive or plastic put over their heads. It’s hard to comprehend,” she says.

In the camp, fear was constant. One night, she says, her aunt was taken from beside her and killed. That moment changed how Ly learned to survive.

“You have to shut down your emotions. They killed her and from that time on, I shut down my feelings,” Ly says. “I can’t even cry, because if I dare to cry and express my feelings, I might be taken away,”

Later, as the war neared its end, Ly’s mother and two older sisters—Prasith and Samnang—survived. Her brother, Sambath, did not.

He came to her one night and asked her to hem his pants. Only later did she realize he was quietly saying goodbye—preparing to escape. She never saw him again.

“Americans say open up to help you heal, but to open up hurts more,” Ly says.

A new life—and a promise to be a voice

In 1981, when she was 21, Ly, her mother, her grandfather, and her sister Prasith and her family were sponsored by relatives and granted asylum in the United States.

They settled in Breckenridge, Texas, and began rebuilding from nothing, working long hours in a sewing factory for low wages. Ly’s mother—now 93—still lives independently in Texas.

Ly never married. Her sister Samnang remained in Cambodia and died in December 1997, just as Ly and their mother were preparing to bring her and her family to the U.S.

After Samnang’s death, Ly sponsored her sister’s children—then 10, 12, and 16—to come live with her. She says immigration laws made it difficult, but she succeeded.

“They all completed their education and got married,” Ly says.

The trauma, she believes, shaped her life’s direction—especially her focus on protecting children and speaking for people who feel unheard.

When she arrived in the U.S. as a refugee, she made a promise to herself: she would become a voice for her community.

“I use that trauma as a strength to help my community,” she says. “I use it to heal myself.”