Henry Kamm, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning international correspondent for The New York Occasions who coated Chilly Battle diplomacy in Europe and the Soviet Union, famine in Africa, and wars and genocide in Southeast Asia, died on Sunday in Paris. He was 98.
Mr. Kamm’s son Thomas confirmed the dying, at St. Joseph’s Hospital.
From the continent he had fled at 15 to flee Nazi persecution throughout World Battle II, to the battlefields and killing fields of what was then generally known as Indochina, Mr. Kamm was the consummate star of The Occasions’s international workers: a quick, correct, trendy author, fluent in 5 languages, with international contacts and reportorial instincts that discovered human dramas and historic views within the day’s information.
His early displacement deeply influenced his 47-year profession with The Occasions, Thomas Kamm, a former Wall Road Journal correspondent, mentioned in an electronic mail in 2017. It “explains the curiosity he all the time confirmed all through his journalistic profession for refugees, dissidents, these and not using a voice and the downtrodden,” he mentioned.
Henry Kamm received the 1978 Pulitzer Prize in worldwide reporting for articles on the plight of refugees from Southeast Asia who fled their war-torn homelands in 1977 and braved the South China Sea. Many sailed for months in small, unsafe fishing boats, struggling horrendous privations, solely to seek out themselves undesirable on any shore.
In interviews with a whole bunch of the refugees — “boat individuals,” as they had been known as, who had sought security within the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Japan — Mr. Kamm wrote of the despair of males, ladies and youngsters whose escape from possible dying had led to ordeals of close to hunger, terrors of drowning on the excessive seas and crushing rejection because the world turned them away.
“Within the unhappy image of the wanderings on land and sea of tens of hundreds of refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia for the reason that finish of the Indochinese struggle two years in the past,” Mr. Kamm wrote from Singapore, “nothing exemplifies so totally all of the ironies and ache of people that thought they had been selecting freedom and wound up in a limbo of hostility or indifference from these from whom they anticipated assist.”
A decrepit freighter driving at anchor out in Singapore Harbor, he wrote, was laden with 249 Southeast Asian refugees who had boarded the ship in Thailand and had lived on its open deck, via pitching storms and cruel days of baking solar, for 4 months, discovering no haven in port after port.
“At first they waited to go to a rustic that may give them a house,” Mr. Kamm wrote. “Then they lowered their hopes to discovering a rustic that may acknowledge their existence and allow them to ashore a minimum of quickly till one authorities or one other determined to allow them to come to remain.”
Due to Mr. Kamm’s experiences, the Pulitzer judges famous, the USA and a number of other different nations ultimately opened their doorways to the Southeast Asian refugees.
Mr. Kamm later wrote two books about Asia. In “Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the Vietnamese” (1996), he portrayed a nation struggling underneath communism and recapitulated its struggle with the USA within the perspective of a 4,000-year historical past.
His guide “Cambodia: Report From a Stricken Land” (1998) traced that nation’s descent into barbarity, from the homicide of tens of millions of its personal residents by the Khmer Rouge within the late Seventies via the many years of financial and social struggling that adopted.
“Kamm’s account of Cambodia’s lengthy tragedy is spare, blunt and offended,” Arnold R. Isaacs wrote in The New York Occasions Guide Evaluate. “Primarily based nearly solely on his personal reporting, it attracts little if any materials from the work of different journalists and historians. That this seems to be a power, not a weak spot, is a tribute to the standard of Kamm’s journalism over time.”
He was born Hans Kamm in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw in Poland) on June 3, 1925, to Rudolf and Paula (Wischnewski) Kamm. The boy grew up fluent in German and Polish.
His Jewish father was arrested in Nazi roundups of Jews following the occasions of Crystal Night time in November 1939, however was launched from the Buchenwald focus camp given that he go away Germany, which he did in late 1939, making his solution to England and the USA, the place he settled. Hans and his mom, after an extended, fearful look forward to visas in Breslau, crossed Europe in a sealed practice to Portugal and reached New York on a Portuguese ship in 1941.
Hans attended George Washington Excessive Faculty within the Washington Heights part of Manhattan and discovered English. In 1943, he was naturalized as an American citizen underneath the title Henry Kamm. Turning 18, he enlisted within the World Battle II Military and fought the Germans in Belgium and France, the place he discovered French.
Discharged in 1946, he attended New York College and graduated in 1949 with a level in English. Impressed by his information of international affairs and language abilities, The Occasions employed him as a replica boy.
Over the following decade, Mr. Kamm was a newsroom clerk after which a replica editor in New York, however had three bylined articles, two in 1958 about developments within the recording trade and a 1954 first-person account of island-hopping journey within the Lesser Antilles, an island chain within the jap Caribbean.
In 1950, he married Barbara Lifton. They’d three kids: Alison, Thomas and Nicholas. The couple separated within the late Seventies and had been divorced a few years later. For the reason that ’70s, Mr. Kamm had lived with Pham Lan Huong, with whom he raised her son, Bao Son. Apart from Pham Lan Huong, who died in 2018, all of them survive Mr. Kamm, together with 10 grandchildren.
After The Occasions started a Paris-based worldwide version in 1960, Mr. Kamm was despatched there as an assistant information editor. In 1964, he turned a international correspondent and commenced masking tales throughout Europe.
He was assigned to cowl Poland full time in 1966.
In 1967, he wrote from Lidice, within the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic), of the lingering horrors of the 1942 bloodbath of 173 males as a reprisal for the assassination of a Nazi official. And in a go to to Auschwitz, the place tens of millions of Jews had been killed by the Nazis, Mr. Kamm advised of an previous lady swaying atop the ruins of a crematory the place our bodies had been burned as she learn the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the useless.
“The previous lady completed the prayer, kissed the guide and returned it to the buying bag she had held between her ft whereas she prayed,” he wrote. “From the bag, she took a candle that Jews gentle on the anniversary of a beloved one’s dying. She lit it, put it in a sheltered spot deep within the rubble of the furnace, climbed all the way down to the bottom and left silently.”
Mr. Kamm was The Occasions’s Moscow bureau chief from 1967 to 1969, and received a George Polk Award for his reporting from the Soviet Union.
In 1968, he coated the Prague Spring, a interval of liberal reforms — later suppressed by invading Warsaw Pact troops — underneath the Communist chief Alexander Dubcek.
Amongst Mr. Kamm’s finest information sources was his buddy Vaclav Havel, the Czech author and dissident who turned the final president of Czechoslovakia (1989-92) and the Czech Republic’s first president (1993-2003).
Mr. Kamm later had assignments in Southeast Asia, Paris and Tokyo, the place he was bureau chief.
Within the Nineteen Eighties, whereas based mostly in Rome and Athens, he made frequent journeys to sub-Saharan Africa to cowl devastating droughts, crop failures and famine. Primarily based in Geneva within the Nineties, he reported from many international locations in Europe and Asia.
After retiring in 1996, Mr. Kamm lived in Lagnes, France, close to Avignon in Provence. He later moved to a retirement house within the west of Paris, adjoining to the Bois de Boulogne park.
In 2018, he utilized for and acquired German citizenship — a reconciliation, of types, with the nation he had fled as a youngster. The archive of his papers, together with some 7,000 Occasions articles, is held by the New York Public Library.
