With thousands being executed in Cambodia simply for manifesting signs of intellect or Western influence - even wearing glasses or wristwatches - Mr. Dith survived by masquerading as an uneducated peasant, toiling in the fields and subsisting on as little as a mouthful of rice a day and whatever small animals he could catch.
For slaughter on the scale inflicted by the Khmer Rouge - an estimated 1.5 million died of starvation, executions, overwork, and torture - the grief could be immobilizing, but not for Mr. Dith. He saved Schanberg from death at rebel hands before facing it himself many times during the four years of the Khmer Rouge's bloody reign.
When Schanberg won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for his Cambodia reporting at The New York Times, he shared the honor with Mr. Dith, who at the time was missing in his native country.
With Schanberg's help, Mr. Dith began life anew in the United States as a photographer for the Times. Mr. Dith emerged as an eloquent spokesman for Cambodian genocide victims, a role he filled until his death.
"A clear-eyed reporter who lived through horror and survived to tell his story in his own words, for 30 years Dith Pran . . . played a key role in bringing the crimes of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime to world attention, especially in the United States," said Ben Kiernan, founding director of the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University.
He was "a journalist and hero," New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said in a letter to the staff yesterday. He added: "that last word is not one I use lightly."
Mr. Dith was named a goodwill ambassador to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He established the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project to educate students about the atrocities. He sought to preserve evidence of the genocide and bring the perpetrators before the ongoing international tribunal as a member of the Cambodia Documentation Commission, a human rights group. And he compiled first-person accounts of the Khmer Rouge's crimes against children in a 1998 book, "Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields."
"I am a Cambodian holocaust survivor," he often declared, "and I have to be a messenger."
