Phnom Penh (capitol city of Cambodia) & The Killing Fields and S-21 Genocide Museum
(Rated R: contains graphic descriptions of violence...none that happened to us)
We arrived in Phnom Penh by bus from Saigon. The bus pulled over in front of the bus company’s shop and there was a veritable gang of tuk tuk drivers hanging around waiting to pounce. One of them ended up latching onto Amir, and it was a good thing, too. His name was Mr. Ya and he was a very straight-forward guy who ended up taking us to a great guest house where we found a room for $10 per night with A/C and then he took us to the Killing Fields and the S-21 genocide museum the next day for a reasonable price. The Killing Fields is where Pol Pot's henchman killed thousands of city dwelling Cambodians and the S-21 Genocide Museum is where they were first detained and tortured before execution at the Killing Fields.
Mr. Ya picked us up the next morning around 11am at our guesthouse. We hopped into the back of his tuk tuk and he drove us off to the Killing Fields located about 14km south of the city of Phnom Penh. Cambodia is blazing hot; the hottest place we’ve been in thus far. When we stepped out of the tuk tuk into the dead heat and blazing sun of the mostly treeless, exposed Killing Fields, it was withering.
The fields themselves are dry and barren. There are burnt out grasses standing around but the only greenery to speak of are the few trees (used for horrible purposes back then) and the marsh plants growing in the bogs to the rear of the fields.
The layout was a large squarish area featuring a stupa (Buddhist holy monument) just beyond the entryway. The stupa houses approximately 8,000 skulls and even more femurs, finger bones and other remains of the victims of the Killing Fields. The stupa is somewhere around 17 layers tall in a square and each layer houses a different type of bone. The bottom layer is clothing found on the victims’ decomposing bodies. The next layers as far as the eye can see are skulls. Up above, the top layers house the other bones found, arms, legs, etc. All is housed in glass and one views the remains by scooting around narrow corners and standing in the stifling heat staring at eye level with skulls.
There are placards strategically placed around the fields explaining the various locations and purposes of the trees. One placard claims that Pol Pot was the greatest despot known to mankind and the atrocities he committed far surpassed that of Hitler. I don’t think one can really compare when it comes to atrocities and genocide on the scale of either of those two; they are both horrors.
We passed by several mass graves. There are something like 19,000 plus mass graves that were found throughout Cambodia after Pol Pot’s regime ended. The graves were no more than small rectangular pits. We could see one that was unexcavated that had various white bones poking up through the surface.
There was a tree behind the stupa some distance with a placard explaining it was called The Killing Tree and was used by the Khmer Rouge to kill children by holding them by their feet and swinging them into the tree in order to smash their little heads. They had illustrations as well. It was truly awful to imagine.
The most common way the Khmer Rouge would execute prisoners at the Killing Fields was to make them kneel by the side of one of the mass graves, hands and feet bound, and take a swing at them with whatever was handy, axes, axles, hoes, etc., so they would fall to their death into the grave without the guards making more than the minimal level of effort. After all, at the height of the killings, they had as many as 300 people per day to manually execute. In 1978, there were upwards of 5,000 deaths in one year there. The highest number of deaths prior to that had been in the range of 2,500.
We walked around the entire circumference of the fields, past the bog along the fence where some children were begging. When we got back to where we started, we popped into the only real building there in order to view the photos and captions about the leaders of the Pol Pot regime as well as some of the victims of his despotism. Interestingly enough, several of the leaders ended up dead because Pol Pot thought they were plotting against him.
About an hour at the Killing Fields was enough for us to soak it all in (and to be completely sweat soaked ourselves). We went back to Mr. Ya and he ferried us away to the Genocide Museum which used to be known as the S-21 Prison converted from a school. The day hadn’t gotten any cooler and we were dripping with sweat as we walked into the museum.
The museum was composed of several buildings named A, B, C and D. We started in order with building A, a three-story structure falling apart from the top down. The first level housed individual jail cells and not much had been done to maintain it. Each cell, a former classroom, housed a single metal frame bed with no bed linens or mattress at all. Instead, there rested on top of the frame a shackle for legs and a metal cartridge container. Neither Amir nor I could figure out why the cartridge containers were there.
Most of the rooms had a single blown up picture on the wall that showed one of the 14 bodies found at the prison just after Pol Pot’s henchmen deserted the place as the regime came tumbling down. There are 14 off white graves above ground in the courtyard of the museum for those victims. The state that the bodies were in was gruesome. They had been decomposing for quite some time but the evidence of the torture they underwent was clear. Several of the photos showed a large area underneath the bed stained with blood that no one had even attempted to clean up. I thought that you could still see the blood in the blackish stains on the floor, but I couldn’t be certain.
The second floor was more of the same and the third floor was basically crumbling. The next building over had mass graves built into each former classroom. They were constructed of brick and mortar and were no larger than an armspan wide and probably smaller than that and only as long as a short man’s (a Cambodian) body length lying down. There were more than a dozen in a single room and some of them were windowless. All were extremely dreary and depressing.
The rooms of the upstairs and of the next building housed various exhibits. One was pictorial and showed what were essentially mug shots of all the prisoners detained there. They ranged in age from the elderly to children. There were even pictures of mothers sitting in some kind of torture chair with their babies in their arms fast asleep (or dead?). The next room over showed pictures of the dead bodies of torture victims lying on the ground wasted and destroyed. There wasn’t a single chubby human being among them all.
Other rooms had photo and bio displays of the victims as told by their relatives. Another one had photos and bios of the prison staff; without exception, every one of them said they had no choice but to carry out the wishes of the Pol Pot regime unless they wished to be detained, tortured and executed themselves. Some felt guilt over their involvement and some were defensive.
At 3pm, there was a documentary film played on the 3rd floor of Building D. We waited about 15 minutes for it to start and of course ended up waiting at the wrong door so we were last into the room. Our seats were far enough back for us to be unable to discern much of what was being said in the documentary. There were fans blowing but the air was still so hot and muggy that we ended up leaving after about 20 minutes because it wasn’t worth being that hot for something we could only catch bits and pieces of. The gist was that the documentary followed the story of a young woman and the man who became her husband throughout the days of the Pol Pot regime until her untimely death via the S-21 prison.
There would have been no going to water parks after those two trips. We were utterly depressed. I think personally that it was harder to take because we were actually physically present at the places the victims had suffered so brutally at the hands of the Pol Pot henchman. And to see a placard that tells you the giant, beautiful tree standing proud and tall above you was used to bash in the heads of small children is to be overcome by wonder at the cruelty that is possible in human beings. I feel like it is two halves of a coin. One side of humanity shows boundless possibility for kindness and compassion. The other side shows boundless possibility for cruelty and despotism.
That night we went out for a walk and found a little café situated next to a mall about a block from our guesthouse. The café was mostly full of men drinking draft beer and eating barbecued beef with vegetable platters. It looked great to us so we stopped in, picked a table and ordered a pitcher of pale draft beer and a plate of the beef with the veggies.
The beef was mostly very tasty with only a few pieces of pure fat or gristle thrown into the mix. The veggies were sliced carrots, cucumbers, onions, tomatoes and bananas (with peel). We both took a bite of the banana at the same time and grimaced in disgust. There was some kind of sap that came out of the banana peel and attached itself to my mouth with ferocity. It took quite a while to wipe it off on the back of my hand. Otherwise, the meal was delicious. They gave us little individual bowls of some kind of a salt and pepper mixture with which we could dip our meat and veggies. There were also sliced lemons (but looked like limes) to squirt onto the salt mixture for added flavor.
We went through a few pitchers and then made our way to the park nearby that had a stage set up at one end along with a grouping of tents sheltering various vendors of anything from jewelry to monster bags of shrimp chips to ice cream. I found a vendor that sold steamed corn and, much to my delight, discovered it to be heads and tails above the corn in Saigon. I deduced that they must have cooked it more like 20 minutes as opposed to the 1 ½ hours the Saigon folks must do in order to get their corn so utterly mushy.
The next day we recovered from the heat and depression of the day before by doing mostly nothing. That evening we met up with Sarah and Will, the two Aussies from Saigon, for more draft beer and beef.
Next up...Angkor Wat.
