Day 14...or the day I don't really want to talk about.

Usually, I process well through talking and writing. Today's visits the the Genocide Museum and
Killing Fields leave even me without words or the emotional capacity to want to process it. I will spare you the details of most torture and killing methods I learned about and only give a brief overview. This honestly might still be too much for you.

One wing of the Genocide Museum

I started the day out with the Genocide Museum. When Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in the 70s, it instituted a dismal form of communism.  All schools, churches, museums, libraries, and temples were closed. All the cities where closed, including Phnom Penh. City dwellers were forced into the countryside to join labor camps. Family relations meant nothing. Children went to child labor camps. Mothers to women camps. Fathers to male camps.

The Genocide Museum was a school before it became a prison. This particular prison encompassed a square kilometer of residential areas, but since everyone was driven from their homes, the KR had no problems.  The
museum is divided into three former school buildings. Two are converted into museum displays. One filled with pictures of 1,000 of the 20,000 victims of this prison. The other with more information about the prison, the torture, and the KR regime.  The third was the most difficult because it is still in the same condition as when the Vietnamese Army found it, including blood on the floor. Nothing has been cleaned or touched.

A small shelter protecting a former mass grave

After that, we went to the Killing Fields.  As the leader's paranoia grew, the KR couldn't bury bodies out of the prison fast enough. So they made the prison only a holding and interrogation area. Every day a few hundred people were brought to the killing fields where they were beaten to death one by one.  A loudspeaker drowned out the screams with revolutionary music and chants.

It was even worse than going to Auschwitz. Bone fragments still wash up after big rains and I saw some.  I actually had to step over someone's leg bone. I can't even articulate how awful this was.

The stupa memorial

Another area had a large tree with excavated graves of women and children. In records, they discovered most of the children died by being held by their feet and having their heads bashed into the tree.

A large monument contains skulls of many of the victims. You can go inside and pay respects. They have many marked with stickers indicating age, gender, and the method of murder. I couldn't stay in to walk around the whole place. It was too much.

Why?

There is little rhyme or reason. My guide kept saying the country is still searching for answers. Many people were arrested and tortured until they wrote false confessions about being members of the CIA or KGB. I think that might be the most awful thing, it was so senseless. Khmer Rouge pressed young villagers into service and made them do increasingly heinous things. Eventually, Cambodians were killing Cambodians in the most brutal fashion.

Some might ask why go? Why subject myself to these horrific things?  Two reasons.

A quiet area for reflection

One, it is a major aspect of Cambodian history. 1 in 4 Cambodians were murdered for seemingly no reason. The KR had no real intelligence branch and just arrested people that *might* be a threat. When one person was suspected, the entire family was murdered. My tour guide at the museum said when she returned to her village, she had no idea where her mother or father or sisters or brother were. It was only after a few years that her mother returned to the village. Thousands of Cambodians still live with the strain of not knowing for sure their loved ones were killed by Khmer Rouge.

Two, this happens everywhere. From Nazi Germany and the Jewish Holocaust, to the Rwandan genocide, to the U.S.'s treatment of Native Americans. By experiencing the horror, there is a little part of me that hopefully is strengthened to stand up against genocide today and in the future.