with sticks. Children were flung into the air and then slashed with bayonets. Women were raped and staked in their genitals to death. Many civilians attempted to hide in the pagodas of Tam Buu and Phi Lai in the town, where they thought they would be safe. The Khmer Rouge quickly surrounded the pagoda and began to fire into it, killing 80 people. At least 100 people tried to surrender to the Khmer Rouge soldiers and were immediately massacred. At Tam Buu Pagoda, about 800 people were marched out of the building into a barren field and executed. Many civilians escaped the massacres in the town and attempted to hide in the caves outside the town. The Khmer Rouge, using tracking dogs, followed the civilians into the caves, throwing grenades and shooting inside to kill the hiding civilians. By 30 April, the Khmer Rouge had retreated from the town before the Vietnamese army showed up leaving land mines that killed or injured another 200. By the end of the massacre, 3,157 civilians had been killed. Nguyen Van Kinh, a survivor of the massacre, recounted: "…my wife, four children and six grandchildren were all killed. Before shooting, they forced [us] to strip all jewelry and property […] When I woke up, I looked around and saw all the bodies. I was dumbfounded when I saw my granddaughter holding her mother's breast and sucking and next to her dear daughter lying motionless in a pool of blood." He crawled out of a pile of corpses under the cover of darkness and hid in a cave in the Dâmrei Mountains, known as Elephant Mountain, when "those who were mutilated by Pol Pot did not stop screaming". Another survivor, He Thi Nga, was taken captive near the border with her parents, siblings, husband and six children and was brutally beaten. Her young daughter was hit three times in the head with an iron bar, screaming "Mom. Mom! Help me!" When she had regained consciousness, her whole family was dead. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Sang, a girl who fled with her parents to Sam Poh Temple, and the villagers who took refuge inside the temple were driven by the Khmer Rouge to the wasteland outside the temple, where they were shot en masse. She was rescued from a pile of corpses and taken to the hospital after the Khmer Rouge evacuated. Aftermath At the end of