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 wars and genocides in Southeast Asia, died Sunday in Paris. He is 98.
Mr. Kamm’s son Thomas confirmed the death, in 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 what was then known as Indochina, Mr. Kamm was the absolute star of The Times’ foreign staff: a quick, precise, stylish writer, fluent in five languages, with global contacts and a reportorial instinct that found human dramas and historical insights in the news at that day.
His early transition greatly influenced his 47-year career at The Times, Thomas Kamm, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent, said in an email in 2017. “This explains the interest he has consistently shown throughout his career in journalism for refugees, dissidents, the voiceless and the oppressed,” he said.
Henry Kamm won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for articles on the plight of refugees from Southeast Asia who fled their homelands in 1977 and fought in the South China Sea. Many sailed for months in small, unsafe fishing boats, suffering terrible misfortunes, only to find themselves unwelcome on any shore.
In interviews with hundreds of refugees — “boat people,” as they are called, who have sought safety in the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Japan — Mr. Kamm writes of the men’s despair, women and children fleeing from probable death lead to trials of near starvation, fears of drowning at sea and crushing rejection as the world shuns them.
“In the grim picture of the land and sea wanderings of tens of thousands of refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia since the end of the Indochinese war two years ago,” wrote Mr. Kamm from Singapore, “nothing fully shows all the irony and pain of people who think they are choosing freedom and end up in a limbo of hatred or indifference from those they hope to help.”
A frail freighter at anchor in Singapore Harbor, he wrote, was loaded with 249 Southeast Asian refugees who boarded the ship in Thailand and lived on its open deck, through storms and merciless days of baking sun. , for four months, no shelter could be found in port after port.
“At first they waited to go to a country that would give them a home,” Mr. Kamm wrote. “Then they gave up their hope of finding a country that would recognize their existence and let them come ashore at least temporarily until one government or another decided to let them stay.”
Because of Mr. Kamm’s reports, the Pulitzer judges said, the United States and several other countries eventually opened their doors to Southeast Asian refugees.
Mr. Kamm later wrote two books about Asia. In “Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the Vietnamese” (1996), he describes a country struggling under communism and describes its war with the United States in the perspective of 4,000 years of history.
His book “Cambodia: Report From a Stricken Land” (1998) traces that country’s descent into barbarism, from the Khmer Rouge’s massacre of millions of its citizens in the late 1970s to decades of suffering economically and socially followed.
“Kamm’s account of Cambodia’s long tragedy is unsparing, frank and angry,” wrote Arnold R. Isaacs in The New York Times Book Review. “Based almost entirely on his own reporting, it draws little if any material from the work of other journalists and historians. That this turns out to be a strength, not a weakness, is a tribute to the quality of Kamm’s journalism. in recent years.
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.
His Jewish father was arrested in Nazi roundups of Jews following the events of Crystal Night in November 1938, but was released from the Buchenwald concentration camp on the condition that he leave Germany, which he did in May 1939. , towards England and United. States, where he lived. 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 was 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.
In 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 developments in the recording industry and a 1954 first-person account of island-hopping travel in 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 several years later. Since the ’70s, Mr. Kamm has lived with Pham Lan Huong, with whom he raised his son Bao Son. Except for Pham Lan Huong, who died in 2018, they all survived Mr. Kamm, along with 10 grandchildren.
After The Times started an international edition based in Paris in 1960, Mr. Kamm as an assistant news editor. In 1964, he became a foreign correspondent and began covering stories across Europe.
He was assigned to cover the entire period in Poland in 1966.
In 1967, he wrote from Lidice, in the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic), of the lingering horror of the 1942 massacre of 173 men in retaliation for the killing of a Nazi officer. And on a visit to Auschwitz, where millions of Jews were killed by the Nazis, Mr. Kamm told of an old woman swinging over the ruins of a crematorium where bodies were burned as he read the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.
“The old woman finished praying, kissed the book and returned it to the shopping bag she was holding 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 sheltered place deep in the ruins of the furnace, descended to the ground and silently departed.”
Mr. Kamm was The Times’ Moscow bureau chief from 1967 to 1969, and won the George Polk Award for his 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 leader Alexander Dubcek.
Among Mr. Kamm’s best news sources is his friend Vaclav Havel, the Czech writer and dissident who was the last president of Czechoslovakia (1989-92) and the first president of the Czech Republic (1993-2003). .
Mr. Kamm later had assignments in Southeast Asia, Paris and Tokyo, where he was bureau chief.
In the 1970s, while based in Paris, 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. Kamm lived in Lagnes, France, near Avignon in Provence. He later moved to a retirement home in the west of Paris, next to the Bois de Boulogne park.
In 2018, he applied for and received German citizenship — a reconciliation, of sorts, with the country he fled as a teenager. An archive of his papers, including some 7,000 Times articles, is held by the New York Public Library.