JAKARTA, Indonesia — I grew up in the shadow of the Indonesian massacres exposed in Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary documentary, “The Act of Killing,” which has been nominated for an Academy Award.

I was a couple of months old in October 1965, when the Indonesian government gave free rein to a mix of Indonesian soldiers and paramilitaries to kill anyone they considered to be a “communist.” Over the next few months into 1966, at least 500,000 people were killed (the total may be as high as one million). The victims included members of the Communist Party of Indonesia (P.K.I.), ethnic Chinese, as well as trade unionists, teachers, civil society activists and leftist artists.

My father, an ethnic Chinese, recognized early on the threat to our family, and we fled our East Java town of Jember to the relative safety of the port of Surabaya. There we took refuge while Jember was the scene of savage killings of our friends and neighbors.

Years later, my father’s trusted employee, Man Tuka, would walk with me around Jember and tell me stories about the many lives lost during the massacres. When I was eight or nine years old, he described to me a scene that has haunted me ever since.