In my travels, I have had the opportunity to visit sites of extreme human atrocities. I have been to the Holocaust Museum in Berlin, Auschwitz in Poland, and the Terror Hanza in Budapest. Each has left a profound impact on me, both from a modern history student standpoint and a personal, emotional one. Visiting Auschwitz was one of the most powerful and impressionable experiences I have ever had. Today, I will add the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Choeung Ek Memorial (the Killing Fields) in Cambodia to that list.
* I only took two photos during this visit. They are both at the entrances to the complexes. I did not feel comfortable taking photos in a place where so many people were killed. *
To give you some context, the Khmer Rouge were a communist revolutionary force that rose to power in 1975. Their leader, Pol Pot, wanted to radically revolutionize the nation by creating an "equalized" agricultural working class. To obtain this ideal society, he forcibly relocated everyone from the cities to the countryside and turned them into slave labourers. Those who he deemed intellectuals, CIA/KGB spies, foreigners or even people with "soft hands and glasses" became enemies of the new regime and were tortured and killed. In their three year reign, it is believed that about 1.7 million Cambodians perished in this political genocide.
We started off at the Tuol Sleng museum. This building complex used to be a high school before the Khmer Rouge took over the country. After, it turned into "Security Prison 21" or S-21, the largest torture and detention centre in the country. We didn't hire a guide and instead just walked through the buildings, reading the sparse signs and taking it all in.
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| The entrance to Tuol Sleng museum |
One building housed the torture cells, where all that remains were rusted beds and shackles with a picture of what the Vietnamese saw when they arrived (often a mutilated dead body on or beside the bed). The next building was one where they would hold mass amounts of people, upwards of 30 or 40 until there were rooms in cells for them. Now, it was filled with haunting photographs of the victims. They stare at you, young/old, male/female as you walk up and down the rooms. I found that to be very emotional. Each face is a different story and each face was systematically murdered only 40 years ago. In one room, they put stories to the names and included the biographies and "confessions" (often forced and untrue after torture) of the victims. The hardest one to read was of a 20 year old boy who had worked on a farm and was accused of stealing rice rations. He maintained his innocence throughout his confession.
The next two buildings housed the cells, first brick ones and then wooden ones. There were barbed wire on the balconies so no one could throw themselves off the building and commit suicide. I actually started to have a bit of a panic attack in the wooden one hallway and had to leave. I felt very claustrophobic and way too empathetic. It was easy to imagine how horrible it must have been to stay there.
Out of approximately 17,000 prisoners in this detention centre, only seven survived. Of those seven, two were at the end of the museum. They had written books and posed for photographs. While I didn't buy a book or take a photo, when I waked by the less busy man, I gave him a polite head nod. He acknowledge and nodded back. Sometimes words can't be said. Sometimes nothing should be said.
After the prisoners time at Tuol Sleng, they were transported 17 km to Choeung Ek. They were told they were just being transferred to a different building, unbeknownst that they were being driven to a killing field. During the Khmer Rouge, there were numerous killing fields and mass graves across Cambodia. The Cambodian government decided to turn Choeung Ek into a memorial dedicated to all of them. That was next on our list.
At the entrance, there is a large Hindu stupa where you go to pay your respects. Inside were the exhumed remains of 8,895 bodies they had recovered from the mass graves. They were arranged tastefully but honestly. They grouped different types of bones together on different platforms, indicated ages and genders on skulls and how they were killed. Some may think this morbid, but the memorial centre believes that we owe it to the victims to tell how they died. I agree. I mean, isn't that kind of why we have obituaries?
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| The Stupa at Choeung Ek |
For this memorial, we were given helpful audio guides. The difference between the Cambodia n killing fields and the concentration camps of WWII is that they didn't burn the bodies. Instead, they were thrown into mass graves. As you walk around the paths, you often step on or view bits of bone (I walked over a bit of a femur I think) and cloth that have been stuck on roots and are slowly being eroded to visibility. That was pretty heavy. It wasn't everywhere, it wasn't like you were crunching bones as you walked. There was a ton of greenery and trees with just wisps of the past hidden here and there. One mass grave, I saw half of a jawbone with some teeth in it. There was a tree that they called the "killing tree", where they would smash babies into and then threw them into a pit with their deceased mothers. Even though the children were innocents, "to kill the grass, one must pull out the root" they believed. No child would come back seeking revenge. Freaking heavy stuff.
As I walked around and listened to different stories and testimonies, one in particular stood out. It was called the "Magic Tree". It would hold giant speakers that played revolutionary anthems or songs to drown out the sounds of mass murder. They played a snippet of a song along with the sound of a generator and said "this is what the victims would have heard before they were killed". Looking around and listening to that sound made you feel like you were there.
The part that made me really angry during this tour is the fact that the four highest ranking Khmer Rouge leaders are still alive and only went on trial by tribunal in 2007. Pol Pot died in 1998 without any justice other than house arrest in the last year of his life. They are in their 80s now. The first case brought to trial judged Comrade Duch, leader of S21. He admitted guilt and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He's 72. The other cases are awaiting verdicts while some of the defendants dying in that time or becoming unfit to stand trial because of dementia. It seems incredibly frustrating to me. They got to live comfortable lives for 30 years.
As you read this, you probably felt uncomfortable or unsettled and you should be. I was when I visited it. The Vietnamese were when they liberated them. The survivors were when they found out what happened to their families. Yet, it's an important uncomfortableness. I believe that by witnessing sites of atrocities, it will force us to confront the worst of humanity and help create a better society in the future. Yes, it may be wishful thinking, but maybe if everyone in the world was forced to confront these issues of genocide and murder, maybe it'd change some things. Obviously, the writer George Satayna says it best with the famous quote: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".
