Julie on Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields - Read at your own risk

Not much to say that hasn’t been said before. The horror, the horror.

The school turned prison camp in Phnom Penh, S-21, rivals any death camp of the Nazis. Each classroom-turned-torture chamber is left bare, with a bed frame and a gruesome photo enlarged on the wall. The victims of the torture look nothing like human bodies. In fact, the bodies are unrecognizable. The blood stains on the tile floor have been left behind, and the instruments of torture are housed in an open room, with paintings illustrating their use. I found out later that the paintings were done by a man who was one of 7 survivors of the S-21 out of an estimated 14,000 people. How efficient were the Khmer Rouge.

The large ground floor lecture halls in another building are filled with the documentary mug shot style photos that the Khmer Rouge took of all the prisoners who passed through the prison. Everyone in every photo is dead: tortured, raped and murdered by the evil government that was supposed to bring Cambodia into the peaceful future. Even the children and nursing mothers, all murdered. Few died peacefully.

Alex and I were unprepared for the visceral nature of visiting the prison. I had visited a concentration camp outside of Berlin, so I thought I knew what to expect. I was wrong.

There is nothing anyone can say to prepare you for it, and no way that I can describe to make it seem real.

The Killing Fields are located about 15 km outside of Phnom Penh. This is where the prisoners of S-21 were murdered en masse and tossed into grave pits. The fields were discovered by a farmer in 1980. He noticed an overpowering stench of decay, and discovered thousands and thousands of bodies under a light layer of soil. Our tour guide told us that local farmers tore down all the original buildings on the site, because it was simply too painful to look at them.

What is left at the Killing Fields are huge craters where the bodies have been unearthed. Over 100 mass graves have been found on site. The exhumation is far from complete, as there are bits of human bones and cloth poking out of the ground all along the foot paths. The tour guide said there is simply not enough money or resources to exhume all the bodies.

The most wrenching experience for me was the pit that contained the bodies of woman and infants. Instead of wasting precious bullets on infants, the Khmer Rouge soldiers simply bashed the babies heads against a tree and tossed them in the pits. The tree still stands. The women were found naked, leading historians to believe they had all been raped before they were beaten to death. A painting by the former prisoner of S-21 attests to both of these theories.

I’m glad I went, but not sure if I would ever go back.

On a side note: the accompanying pictures are from the beautiful Cambodian Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, where we went to attain some level of tranquility after having visited Tuol Sleng. We just leisurely wandered around the grounds, and it was a very comforting way to let what we had experienced kind of soak in. The grounds housed some amazing Buddhas and shrines and other interiors (for example, the subtly spectacular Emerald Buddha in the Silver Pagoda), but pictures weren’t allowed. These pictures will hold the place of any unnecessary and incomprehensible images from S-21 and the Killing Fields.

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