To understand the nationalist fervor he brought to this commitment, we must realize how estranged Saloth Sar was from his surroundings. He was not really at home in France. In the cold, crowded streets and cramped student quarters, he often must have felt lonely and disoriented. Although he spoke and read French fluently, he had no connections with the country. Unlike Mumm and Vannsak, who married French women, Sar made little effort to assimilate. Apparently, most of his friends were Khmer. Perhaps in this exile, he became more consciously Cambodian than he had been at home.

His first known action in Paris, however, was surprisingly adventurous. For summer vacation in 1950 he and seventeen other Cambodians volunteered with French students in a labor battalion in the renegade Communist state of Yugoslavia, which had broken off its smothering alliance with the Soviet Union two years before. Sar’s decision demonstrates that he was not yet a member of the French Communist party, for party members who traveled to Yugoslavia in July 1950 were summarily dismissed. His action, however, may have been only tangentially political. Becoming a volunteer probably seemed like a pleasant way to pass the summer. Indeed, speaking to Nate Thayer in 1997, Pol Pot recalled, “I went [to Yugoslavia] because it was vacation time and I had no money ... we went just for pleasure.”

Whatever his motives were, Saloth Sar worked for a month as a manual laborer in a Communist country at an exciting stage of its development. The regime was led by the World War II resistance hero Josip (Tito) Broz, who, in breaking with the Soviets, had drawn venomous attacks from the USSR and from other Communist parties in Europe. Between 1948 and the end of 1950, Tito’s Yugoslavia stood alone, isolated from the West and expecting a Soviet invasion. To mobilize his people, Tito engaged them in massive construction projects. This nationally based communism, an affront to Stalin, appealed to anticommunist intellectuals in France, including members of the Socialist party, who were dismayed by the French Communist party’s subservience to the Soviet Union. In 1949-1950, as Pierre Brocheux has recalled, lycées in Paris became a battleground for Socialists trying to recruit students to work in Yugoslavia and Communists trying to keep the students at home. Sar was probably caught up in this recruitment drive.6 Twenty-eight years later, he told Yugoslavian journalists that he had spent “more than a month” working as a manual laborer in Zagreb. Smiling, he said, “I had occasion to meet Yugoslavs, and I attended a Yugoslav folklore performance.”7