A school is a place
where people can better their lives through education. School can lead to a
good job with a good house and a well looked after family. So how does a place
of learning turn into one of horror and torture? S-21 in Phnom Penh had been a
high school. By 1975 it had turned into a place where academics, doctors,
teachers, students, factory workers, monks, engineers, etc. were tortured and
interrogated before being executed.
It costs $2 to visit
S-21 a place I would gladly pay $5-10 to see. Upon entering the first building
it is obvious that this is not going to be your typical museum. There are no
pristine artifacts securely placed behind bulletproof glass, only signs asking
visitors to please not touch the instruments of torture. Everything has been left
just how the Khmer Rouge left it. Visitors are asked to keep quite, a rule that
most observe and the silence while standing in a room that would have once been
filled with the screams of victims chills you to the bone.
The third floor of
Building A still somewhat resembled a school with no torture devises on display
and blackboards still firmly attached to the peeling walls. It even had that
old school smell. So many feelings came over me all at once as I walked from
room to room, confusion, sickness, bitterness, sadness, shock and hatred
The looks on the faces of
prisoners ranged from horror and shock to fear and confusion and in a few
instances amusement. The amused faces are hard to take in because you know
their fate. You know that while at the time they may have been thinking it
couldn’t be that bad that it was in fact that bad and perhaps worse.
All the pictures are
hard to look at but perhaps the hardest to view were those of the children. You
can't help but stare at them and think what could these children have possibly
done to earn such a fate? How could someone torture children? Oh how they must
have screamed for their mothers, their mothers who were locked away in cells
far away or haphazardly buried miles away in shallow graves. How do you explain
why such horrible things are happening to your children when you don’t
understand them yourself?
You wander through room after room of
primitive yet destructive torture devises and photographs of the mutilated
bodies of prisoners who never got a fair trial or explanation. It was the very
worst of human behaviour in great detail on display for everyone to see.
Next comes a place with
a name that leaves nothing to the imagination. The Killing Fields.
The field looks like a battleground.
Every few feet there is another huge divot. It’s as though hundreds of bombs
were dropped during a war but then you learn that there were no bombs, no army
blitzed the area. These are the shallow graves where thousands of innocent
people were disposed of like compost.
Signs tell of the bodies recovered from several sites. There were 405
found from this one, 166 headless corpses from that one and over 100 naked
bodies of women and children from that one over there.
There are 2 trees on the
property that served cruel purposes. One called The Killing Tree was used to
beat children. One observer described how the tree was covered with blood,
brain matter, skin and hair. The other tree was called The Magic Tree, which
was used to blast noise from a loud speaker that would drown out the moans of those
being executed.
The Killing Fields are
quite small and eerily peaceful. Butterflies flutter around mass graves
traveling from one delicate purple flower to another. Chickens peck around
trees used to hang the outspoken and beat the children while nearby students
laugh and run around their schoolyard.
And as an observer you
take it all in as you walk over shards of bone that have appeared over night
brought out of their shallow graves by heavy rains and you look around
marveling at a world at odds with the past.
Pictures: http://acanuckandherbackpack.blogspot.com/
