The Killing Fields

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The next morning we woke up and went to a killing field.  It was pretty unreal.  There was a pagoda when we entered the area that was fourteen floors high and was packed to the rafters with human skulls.  Behind it were the actual killing fields.  There were dirt paths snaking around, and to the side of them were the killing fields, which were about nine square meters of area and I think our tour guide said nine meters deep.  They were dug by the people who were going to be killed in them.  When they did kill people in them, they would do it brutally, in torturous ways, breaking their bones with razorlike heavy leaves or the butt of a rifle, and then leave them to bake and die in the sun.  At the end of the day they would cover the bodies with chemicals to kill off anyone who hadn’t died or was just pretending to be dead.  And it would melt the bodies.  So in a space where you could normally fit like 100 people, they’d fit about 450.  Children were killed too.  They’d play music to cover their screams so other kids wouldn’t know what was going on.

 

The worst part was that, literally RIGHT beside the killing field, there was this amazingly beautiful little river that split into two different levels and had incredibly green vegetation all over it.  I think it just made the whole thing a little bit more depressing.

 

After that we went to the Phnom Penh High School, which had been taken over by the Khmer Rouge and turned into Security Center 21 (S-21), which was one of the most brutal torture and death camps that there was, and is now maintained as a museum/monument.

 

In the first building they mostly kept the officers of Pol Pot (whose real name was said like Salath Sar) whom he suspected of turning against him.  They got a steel bed and their own space, but they were chained to the bed and tortured pretty brutally and often killed.  The second building has tons of pictures of people in the Khmer Rouge, including hundreds of little girls forced to work for the regime who all had the same short haircut and same uniform.  There were also tons of pictures of beaten, starved, and killed young men, and photos of them having their mugshots taken with a rifle pointed at the back of their heads.

 

The third building had the group containment areas.  They took a single room that they would have kept one of the officers in and put some wooden planks up in it and would then keep like twenty five people in a room.  I think each person got roughly twenty-four square feet of space, and they were chained to it, and a young Rouge with a rifle would be guarding them at all times.  There was barbed wire guarding the balconies so that people couldn’t throw themselves off and kill themselves.  The rules posted were also pretty amazingly brutal and forward.  It was things like “Do everything I say with no hesitation.  If you hesitate you will be given twelve lashes of a whip or six shocks of electricity.  Do not question what I ask you to do.  Do not ask about my motives.  Do not talk about your own ideas.  Do not complain about anything.” 

 

So yeah.  It was amazingly brutal.  Feel free to read about it on your own if you want, but it’ll mostly just depress you.

 

When I was there I used the bathroom, and I noticed some bathroom art as I turned around, so I stopped for a second and looked at it.  One person had put down a Jewish star and wrote “Jews and Cambodia – Never Again” and then some asshole wrote “Jews invented communism.”  Someone else wrote the name Nixon, an arrow pointing to the name Pol Pot, and then an arrow pointing to the name Bush, and then connected them all at the bottom and wrote “The Arc of Evil.”