VHM_0100

From Thu Duc prison, I was transferred to the Z30 D re-education camp, also known as Base 5, Forest of Leaves (a secret Viet Cong base). The camp was newly established, each building, called a hut, had two floors, with bamboo floors and wooden columns to support the weight of the upper floor. The hut was about 5 meters wide and 20 meters long, with an additional 2 meters for a makeshift toilet at night, bamboo walls, and a thatched roof. I arrived at the camp in July 1977, during the winter and then the Vietnamese New Year. The forest wind blew through the bamboo cracks of the hut, causing nearly 100 female prisoners to suffer from bone-chilling cold at night.

Thanks to visits from my family during Tet (Vietnamese New Year), I wrote a letter asking my mother to send me two old yellow sweaters that I had knitted for my two daughters, Thao and Tien, who were only 4-5 years old when I was still at home. At the camp, I boiled water, soaked the sweaters in laundry detergent, washed them clean, dried them, then unraveled the yarn, rolled it into balls, and knitted a sleeveless sweater to wear for warmth at night and during visits in the winter. At that time, I was thin and malnourished, so the two tiny sweaters were enough to knit a short sleeveless sweater for myself. I used small branches of bamboo as knitting needles, then smoothed and rounded them with pieces of broken glass and pottery to match the yarn I wanted to knit with. After the sweater was finished, it had to be stamped. The camp regulations required prisoners to wear shirts stamped with the name of the Z30 D re-education camp on the back.