nytimes.com – Two weeks after his capture, Mr. Schanberg and other foreigners were evacuated by truck to Thailand, where he filed the first account of the fall and emptying of Phnom Penh. He told of massacres and fires, of streets and roads littered with bodies, of forced marches that turned the city overnight into a graveyard.

“Two million people suddenly moved out of the city in stunned silence — walking, bicycling, pushing cars that had run out of fuel, covering the roads like a human carpet,” he wrote. “A once-throbbing city became an echo chamber of silent streets lined with abandoned cars and gaping, empty shops. Streetlights burned eerily for a population that was no longer there.”