Sydney H. Schanberg Dies at 8. Times Reporter Chronicled Khmer Rouge TerrorOur decision to stay, Mr. Schanberg wrote later, was founded on our belief perhaps, looking back, it was more a devout wish or hope that when the Khmer Rouge won their victory, they would have what they wanted and would end the terrorism and brutal behavior we had written so often about. Document. Sydney H. Schanbergs Pulitzer Winning Coverage of Cambodias Fall. Mr. Schanberg shared his Pulitzer prize with Dith Pran, his assistant. OPEN Document But when the guerrillas rolled in, after a brief period of calm, there was widespread shooting, looting and many executions. Read the latest news and updates on your favorite movies, tv shows stars. Moviefone is your source for entertainment, movie, DVD, online streaming TV news. Mr. Schanberg and Mr. Dith were seized and threatened with death. Most of the soldiers are teenagers, Mr. Schanberg noted in his last dispatch. They are universally grim, robotlike, brutal. Weapons drip from them like fruit from trees grenades, pistols, rifles, rockets. Mr. Diths pleas saved Mr. Schanberg, and the two journalists took refuge in the French Embassy compound, a vestige of colonial rule. Later, Mr. Dith and other Cambodians were expelled from the compound and forced to join an exodus of civilians into the countryside. It was the beginning of a monstrous social experiment the expulsion of millions from cities and the suppression of educated classes to recast Cambodia as an agrarian utopia. The failed experiment over the next four years cost the lives of two million people to starvation, disease, slave labor brutality and murder. 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. Read the Latest Entertainment and Celebrity News, TV News and Breaking News from TVGuide. He told of massacres and fires, of streets and roads littered with bodies, of forced marches that turned the city overnight into a graveyard. Photo. Mr. Schanberg near Hue, Vietnam, in May 1. Credit. Nguyen Ngoc Luong 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. Mr. Schanberg returned to New York. Overwhelmed with guilt over having to leave Mr. Dith behind, he asked for time off to write about his experiences, to help Mr. Diths refugee wife and four children establish a new life in San Francisco and to begin the seemingly hopeless task of finding his friend. He was showered with awards, including the Pulitzer, which he said he shared with Mr. Dith. He also became a metropolitan editor and columnist at The Times. For years there was no news of Mr. Dith, who had disguised his educated background and survived beatings, backbreaking labor and a diet of insects, rodents and as little as a tablespoon of rice a day. In 1. 97. 8, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and replaced Pol Pot with a client regime. Mr. Dith escaped over the border with Thailand in 1. Mr. Schanberg. Photo. Mr. Schanberg, left, with Dith Pran in The New York Timess offices in Manhattan in 1. Credit. The New York Times After moving Mr. Dith and his family to New York and helping him obtain a job as a photographer at The Times, Mr. Schanberg wrote The Death and Life of Dith Pran, a 1. The New York Times Magazine, which was later published as a book. The story became the basis for Roland Joffs 1. The Killing Fields, starring Sam Waterston as Mr. Schanberg and Dr. Haing S. Ngor as Mr. Dith. Dr. Ngor, who won an Oscar for best supporting actor, was a physician who had also survived the Cambodian holocaust. The film was widely praised. The Killing Fields emerges as an emotionally charged vision of hell on earth, a jolting reminder of the wanton destruction of a gentle people by another of historys madmen, Kathleen Carroll wrote in The Daily News. But Vincent Canby of The Times called it diffuse and wandering, adding, Something vital is missing, and thats the emotional intensity of Mr. Schanbergs first person prose. The full movie, The Killing Fields. Sydney Hillel Schanberg was born in Clinton, Mass., on Jan. Louis Schanberg, a grocery store owner, and the former Freda Feinberg. Sydney attended Clinton schools and graduated from Harvard in 1. American history. Drafted in 1. 95. Army newspaper in Frankfurt. Watch Boost Torent Free more. He joined The Times in 1. In 1. 96. 4, he began covering the New York State Legislature, and in 1. Albany bureau chief, in charge of state government reporting. He married Janice Sakofsky in 1. The couple had two daughters, Jessica and Rebecca, who survive him, and were divorced. In 1. 99. 5 he married Jane Freiman, who also survives him. Mr. Schanberg joined The Timess foreign staff in 1. New Delhi. He covered Indias 1. Pakistan in 1. 97. He met Mr. Dith on a trip to Phnom Penh in 1. Mr. Schanbergs reporting from Vietnam and Cambodia grew, The Times hired Mr. Dith as his aide and translator. As the Southeast Asia correspondent from 1. Mr. Schanberg focused increasingly on the Khmer Rouge insurgency. After his foreign assignments, Mr. Schanberg was The Timess metropolitan editor from 1. New York, from 1. It was discontinued after he criticized the Timess coverage of the proposed Westway highway in Manhattan. The Times offered him another assignment, but he left the paper after 2. New York Newsday, where he remained for a decade. Photo. Mr. Schanberg in 1. He was one of 1. 6 writers and news organizations that filed a lawsuit challenging the Pentagons restrictions on news coverage of the war in the Persian Gulf. Credit. Mike AlbansAssociated Press Mr. Schanberg, who lived in New Paltz, N. Y., returned to Cambodia in 1. Vanity Fair. He also wrote for Penthouse and The Nation and columns of media criticism for The Village Voice. Beyond the Killing Fields, an anthology of his reporting, was published in 2. Besides the Pulitzer, he won two George Polk Memorial awards, two Overseas Press Club awards and Sigma Delta Chis distinguished journalism prize. Im a very lucky man to have had Pran as my reporting partner and even luckier that we came to call each other brother, Mr. Schanberg said after Mr. Dith died in 2. 00. His mission with me in Cambodia was to tell the world what suffering his people were going through in a war that was never necessary. It became my mission too. My reporting could not have been done without him. 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