He campaigned for recognition of the Cambodian genocide victims, especially as founder and president of "The Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project", He was recipient of an Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 1899 and the Award oof Excellence of the International Center.

Pran and New York times reporter Sydney Schamberg stayed behind Cambodia to cover the fall of the capital Phnom Penh to Khmer Rough. Sydney and other foreign reporters were allowed to leave the country, but Pran was not. The Khmer Rough were killling the intellectual citizens so Pran hid that he was educated and pretended to be a taxi driver. Pran faced being tortured and starving for four years and escaped and while his journey he encountered corpses and skulls and made the phrase "killing fields".

When he reached Siem Reap the Vietnamese made him village chief. But he was afraid that the Vietnamese would find out his US ties, and so Pran escaped to Thailand on October 3rd 1979.

At that time Vietnam overthrew the Khmer Rouge in December 1978

Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country's murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award winning film "The Killing Fields"