On the Wings of a White Horse: A Cambodian Princess's Story of Surviving the Khmer Rouge Genocide

#388
Title: On the Wings of a White Horse: A Cambodian Princess's Story of Surviving the Khmer Rouge Genocide
Author: Oni Vitandham
Year: 2005
Publisher: Tate Publishing
200 pages

My dilemma with Oni Vitandham's narrative is that I'm not sure whether to trust it as an accurate account. I've read a reasonable number of memoirs of people oppressed by the Khmer Rouge, as well as Holocaust memoirs and war narratives, so I'm familiar with the broad genre of survivor memoir. Many seem unlikely, but that's because were it not for a series of coincidences and fortuitous events, the author would have died.

On the other hand, Vitandham's story seems too coincidental or strange to be entirely convincing. For example, she observes that "the cold air turned the decomposing bodies...blue." This is somewhere between Kompong Som and Phnom Penh, but nowhere in Cambodia does the temperature get below 70F. I've seen Cambodians shiver when the temperature drops to 80, but objectively 70 is not low enough to turn a corpse blue. There may be a plausible alternative explanation, but it's not articulated, and this statement certainly jarred me and made me wonder what other "facts" might be incorrect.

My evaluation is further eroded by her reliance on spiritual/metaphysical explanations, which I respect as beliefs but which don't bolster her objective veracity. Yet some of her less-believable explanations don't go anywhere in a way that actually makes me believe her more. For example, she reports that her father was a prince and she was sent to live in a cave as a child for her own protection. Yet in the post-Khmer Rouge era, there doesn't seem to be an attempt (or, at last, a reported attempt) to re-connect with any remnants of this royal family. She also reports essentially a religious prophesy about her return to Cambodia, but she hasn't (yet) returned.

She seems to be a person who has done good for the Cambodian people, and I don't intend to denigrate that by questioning the accuracy of her story, but until I see more support for her narrative, I can't read it as strictly credible. I would be happy to be wrong, so please send me evidence if you have it.