"The Killing Fields."

"I think how the world is still somehow beautiful even when I feel no joy at being alive within it. " — Loung Ung (First They Killed My Father)

The big sites in Phnom Pehn I wanted to see were the Killing Fields and S-21, a former school turned prison and torture ground by the Khmer Rouge during their bloody reign over Cambodia. The killing fields in pit upon pit of excavated mass graves with a 30 meter high shrine housing bones and tattered clothes dug from the graves. There was a silence and reverence to the place, as is befitting any place marking such atrocities too hard to put to words. Candles and paper swans, small wreaths and gifts were placed around the shrines, and people walked silently and slowly across the grounds almost too afraid to step for fear of showing dishonor to the tortured dead.

Trees upon which former guards would bash the heads of starved victims, or swing the innocent bodies of swaddled babies in order to kill without wasting precious bullets were marked with wooden plaques to grind the pits of stomachs upon reading. The Killing Fields were fields that could be like any other, save they were used for these purposes only, to torture, to mock, to kill, to bury, and to revelry in things so horrid.

S-21 was no more pleasant. It was strange to see a former girls’ school turned in to a prison of such infamy, a place of learning malformed in to a place depravity. Classrooms were turned to torture rooms or divided and then subdivided in to cells so small a man my height could not lay down straight without touching the walls. Barbwire still hung about as reminders of the futility of escape. Torture devices hung on walls downstairs, clubs, knives, electricity, stretching machines, anything to cause pain, to force someone to confess to a “crime” they did not commit, to force someone to turn on loved ones in hopes of a short respite. It was indeed a horrid place, and this is what humanity can do, has done, will likely do again.

Pictures of victims hung on walls to give the place a frightening sense of reality. Photos of children, mere children hung in hoards, all of them dead, all of them killed. Imagine your elementary school horribly transfigured in to a place as this, the school children themselves inmates and victims to a regime without mercy.

The Khmer Rouge was a vengeful and destructive regime. They took control after a civil war and devastated the country. All former military, government officials and employees, and intellectuals were executed. Wearing glasses was enough to have you killed, for glasses showed a sign of intelligence, and intelligence was a threat to the regime. This was a regime that strived to have a country of only uneducated and unskilled peasant laborers. Doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, engineers, everyone was killed. People were sent to labor camps, guarded over, starved to death, beaten, separated from families, tortured, denied care, denied religion, denied sleep, and denied humanity. Estimates put that between 1/4 and 1/3 of the entire country died as a result of the Khmer Rouge’s short reign. A country steep in honor and respect, rich in culture, rich in religion, valuing family, valuing community, valuing friendship, valuing life and sanctity was stripped down to a mere struggle for an aching survival, and a scanty hope. "His government has created a vengeful, bloodthirsty people. Pol Pot has turned me into someone who wants to kill." — Loung Ung (First They Killed My Father)