S21 and Killing Fields

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We had pre-booked Sar, a Tuk Tuk driver to take us to S21, Russian market and the Killing Fields. He turned up on time at our guest house (10am).

First stop S21 (Tuol Sleng Prison), we spent about an hour walking around which is quite enough time in such a shocking place. The first building Block A is where the Vietnam photographers found the fourteen Cambodians, one in each room, each had been tortured and beaten to death, their poor bodies just left where they died. The photographs that were taken are just unbelievable, at first you wonder if the photos are just made up to shock you. But it soon becomes clear that they are actual photos and real tortured people. The fourteen people have grave tombs outside in the court yard as a symbol of the last people who died in the prison.

In the prison, formally a primary school (which seems to add to the shock of it), you are struck by the contrast between the peaceful, sun-soaked compound and the horrific exhibits on display, between the whitewashed classrooms with their yellow and white tiled floors and the instruments of torture they contain. Between the children’s play things outside the buildings and the mug shots of other children en route to being killed.

In the Block D, the eyes of the mounted mug shots, and especially those of the women and children, seem to follow you around. Knowing as we do, and as they did not, that everyone of them was facing death when the photographs were taken gives the photos an unnerving quality that is more affecting than the actual photographs of the dead prisoners.

Reading the stories of the very few survivors and the people who worked at the prison, you can still hear many of these ghost voices in the back of your head. What is most compelling is that many of these people are still alive today and hold secretes that will never be told. It was clear to us that the war was Cambodians against Cambodians so we could not tell who would have carried out these terrible crimes & who was on the receiving end of them. They are perhaps the people who are driving the tut tut’s or owners of the guest houses.

We moved on and Jody had opted to no go to the Killing Fields and so she got dropped off at the Russian market. Bryan on the other hand sped off with Sar in to the distance. Some 15 km later arriving at the Killing Fields.

The drive up to the Killing Fields is like any normal road, and you finally arrive at what looks like a walled garden with an entrance. No beggars are allowed in the Killing Fields. The first thing that you notice is the tall monument and as you get closer to it you notice many different levels about a foot in distance apart. Starting at the bottom you find clothes that have been coming up from the ground as the rain washes away the dirt. Then you have a number of levels, I think 9, which are just littered with skulls that they excavated in 1980, followed by other bones from the human body. The tower is full of human bones, thousands and thousands of them.

Next is the empty field where the old barns, now removed, used to stand. They were where they would unload the people from the lorries and hold them until they where ready to be killed. So behind this small field you have a fence and many, many holes in the ground where in 1980 they excavated (or is it exhumed) the bones of many thousands of people. As you walk around the footpaths at first you don’t notice, but looking on the ground you notice small pieces of clothing. Then you notice bones in the path. You suddenly realise that you are walking over the mass graves.

This was a shocking experience for Bryan in many ways, just how did this happen so close after the German concentration camps of the 2nd WW, how did the rest of the world let it happen, and more the bigger question how did the Cambodian people kill their fellow men. After a war you can be angry at the opposition who killed your fellow men, family or children. But when it is your own people making the killings, who can you be angry at?

One very deep, thought provoking day one which neither of us wish to experience ever again.....

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