Henry Kamm, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times who covered Cold War diplomacy in Europe and the Soviet Union, famine in Africa and war and genocide in Indochina, died Sunday in Paris. He was 98 years old.
Mr Kam’s son Thomas confirmed the death at St Joseph’s Hospital.
From the continent he fled at age 15 to escape Nazi persecution during World War II, to the battlefields and killing fields of Indochina, Mr. Kam was the absolute star of the Times’ foreign staff: a quick, precise, stylish writer, fluent in five languages, global contacts and reportorial instincts that Finds human drama and historical perspective in the news of the day.
His initial displacement profoundly affected his 47-year career with The Times, former Wall Street Journal correspondent Thomas Kamm said in a 2017 email. It explains the interest he always showed in his journalistic career for “refugees, dissidents, the excluded. A voice and the oppressed,” he said.
Henry Kam won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for his article on the plight of refugees from Indochina who fled their war-torn homeland in 1977 and braved the South China Sea. Many traveled for months in small, unsafe fishing boats, suffering excruciating pain, only to find themselves unwelcome on any shore.
In interviews with hundreds of refugees who sought safety in the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Japan – “boat people”, as they were called – Mr Kam wrote of the desperation of the men, women and children who fled from possible death to the ordeal of near-starvation. carried away, rejected by the fear of drowning in the sea and the world turning its back on them.
“The tragic picture of thousands of refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia wandering over land and sea since the end of the Indochina war two years ago,” Written by Mr. Kam From Singapore, “Nothing better exemplifies the irony and pain of those who thought they were choosing freedom and were met with hostility or indifference from those from whom they expected help.”
Anchored in Singapore Harbour, he wrote, a dilapidated cargo ship loaded with 249 Indochinese refugees who had embarked for Thailand and lived on its open decks for four months through merciless days of storms and baking sun. There is no shelter in port after port.
“At first they looked forward to moving to a country that would give them a home,” Mr Kamm wrote. “They then gave up hope of finding a country that would recognize their existence and let them ashore, at least temporarily, until one government or another decided to let them stay.”
Because of Mr. Kam’s report, the Pulitzer judges noted, the United States and several other countries finally opened their doors to Indochinese refugees.
Mr Kam later wrote two books on Asia. In “Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the Vietnamese” (1996), he portrays a nation struggling under communism and reconstructs its war with the United States in the context of 4,000 years of history.
His book “Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land” (1998) traces that country’s brutality from the killing of millions of its own citizens by the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s through the decades of economic and social suffering that followed.
“Work’s account of Cambodia’s long tragedy is spare, blunt and angry,” Arnold R. Isaacs wrote New York Times Book Review. “Based almost entirely on its own reporting, it draws little if any material from the work of other journalists and historians. This has turned out to be a strength, not a weakness, a tribute to the journalistic quality of the work over the years.”
He was born Hans Kamm on June 3, 1925, in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) to Rudolf and Paula (Wisnieski) Kamm. The boy grew up fluent in German and Polish.
His Jewish father was arrested in a Nazi roundup of Jews after the events of Kristallnacht in November 1939, but was released from the Buchenwald concentration camp on the condition that he leave Germany, which he did in late 1939, en route to England and the United States. State, where he settled. Hans and his mother, after a long, terrifying wait for visas in Breslau, crossed Europe on a sealed train to Portugal and arrived in New York on a Portuguese ship in 1941.
Hans attended George Washington High School in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan and learned English. In 1943, he naturalized as an American citizen under the name Henry Kamm. At age 18, he enlisted in the World War II army and fought with the Germans in Belgium and France, where he learned French.
Discharged in 1946, he attended New York University and graduated in 1949 with a degree in English. Impressed by his knowledge of foreign affairs and language skills, The Times hired him as a copy boy.
Over the next decade, Mr. Kamm was a newsroom clerk and then a copy editor in New York, but had three bylined articles, two in 1958 about the development of the recording industry and a first-person account of an island-hopping trip in 1954. Lesser Antilles, an island chain in the eastern Caribbean.
In 1950, he married Barbara Lifton. They had three children: Alison, Thomas and Nicholas. The couple separated in the late 1970s and divorced many years later. Since the 70s, Mr Kam lived with Pham Lan Hung, with whom he raised his adopted son Bao Son. Apart from Pham Lan Hung, who died in 2018, all of them survive Mr Kam, including 10 grandchildren.
After The Times started a Paris-based international edition in 1960, Mr. Kam was sent there as an assistant news editor. In 1964, he became a foreign correspondent and began covering stories across Europe.
He was appointed to cover Poland full-time in 1966.
In 1967, he wrote from Lidice, a reserve in Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic), about the lingering horror of the massacre of 173 men in retaliation for the murder of a Nazi official. And on a visit to Auschwitz, where millions of Jews were killed by the Nazis, Mr. Kam spoke of an old woman standing over the ruins of a crematorium where bodies were cremated as he recited Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.
“The old woman finished her prayer, kissed the book and returned it to the shopping bag she kept between her legs as she prayed,” he wrote. “From the bag, he took a candle that Jews light on the anniversary of the death of a loved one. He lit it, placed it in a shelter deep in the rubble of the furnace, climbed to the ground, and quietly left.”
Mr. Kamm was The Times’ Moscow bureau chief from 1967 to 1969 and won the George Polk Award for reporting from the Soviet Union.
In 1968, he covered the Prague Spring, a period of liberal reforms — later suppressed by invading Warsaw Pact troops — under Communist leadership. Alexander Dubcek.
Mr. Kam’s best source of news was his friend Vaclav HavelCzech writer and dissident who became the last President of Czechoslovakia (1989–92) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993–2003).
Mr. Kam later served in Southeast Asia, Paris and Tokyo, where he was bureau chief.
In the 1980s, while based in Rome and Athens, he traveled frequently to sub-Saharan Africa to cover devastating droughts, crop failures and famines. Based in Geneva in the 1990s, he reported from many countries in Europe and Asia.
After retiring in 1996, Mr. Kam lived in Lagnes, France, near Avignon, Provence. He later moved to a retirement home in the west of Paris adjacent to the Bois de Boulogne Park.
In 2018, he applied for and received German citizenship — a reunification with the nation he ran away with as a teenager. The New York Public Library has an archive of his papers, including about 7,000 articles from The Times.
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