On 14 May 1970: the refugee population at the Church St Joseph, the Seminary, and on the open grounds reached 8.000. Journalist Henry Kamm writes that some 1.500 people lived in the classrooms, the students’ rooms, corridors, porches, and stairways of the Seminary. The Phnom Penh diocese of the Roman Catholic Church provided food (rice, fish, fruit). People drank the water of the Tonle Sap which they carried up in any container they could find. While they were to fetch water, they washed in the river. A Cambodian doctor came in for two hours every morning and six Carmelite nuns provided medical services. Hundreds of refugees lived under bits of clothes stretched on poles. About 1.500 Vietnamese women and children still lived in a village beyond the church. It was the village where men had been arrested on 12 April and never heard from after that (“Vietnamese wait to leave Cambodia.” The New York Times, 14 May 1970, p. 19). According to a New York Time article, by the end of May 1970, the number of refugees was 9.000 to 10.000 (many from Russey Keo Catholic villages nearby). The article describes how they took over the Church so completely with their straw mats, cooking pots, and cardboard suitcases that daily mass and Sunday services had to be cancelled. It also described the refugees stripped down to their undershorts because of the heat, piling pews against the statue of St Joseph in the corner to make room for more families who had arrived with mats and blanket rolls, a baby bedded on the penitent’s prayer bench, and several families sharing the carpeted steps leading to the main altar (“Church in Phnom Penh becomes a Vietnamese refugee village.” The New York Times, 31 May 1970, p. 3). On 8 June 1970: the camp house 11.000 persons (1.721 families), according to the statistics provided by the representative of the Ministry of Social Action of South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Hien (note no. 594, 11 June 1970, ICRC archives, BAG-232-042-001-02).

Refugee camp run by Catholic clergy The Church Saint Joseph, also used as Petit Séminaire (school for training of future priests), was built around 1910s.

Phnom Penh, Kandal Province, Cambodia

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