Molyda Szymusiak , ( born October 19 , 1962 ) ( Cambodian second name Buth Keo ) is a Khmer author and photographer born in Phnom Penh , Cambodia . Following the Khmer Rouge takeover in April 1975 , she and her family were driven out of the capital city into the Cambodian countryside . Nearly all of her immediate family was massacred or starved in the famine that accompanied the ensuing genocide . She and three other members of the family survived , arriving at the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp on the Thai border in 1980 . In 1981 , she and two of her cousins were adopted in Paris by Jan Szymusiak , a French professor and theologian of Polish extraction , and Carmen Affholder . In 1984 , she published a memoir on the Khmer Rouge years , originally written in French ( '' Les Pierres Crieront '' ) , then translated into English and published under the title '' The Stones Cry Out . '' The book is important as one of the few first hand survival narratives of the obscure Pol Pot years of 1975-1979 in Cambodia
genocide
Cambodian genocide
Molyda Szymusiak