We only had 24 hours in Pehnom Penh and we therefore wanted to make sure we had visited S21 and the killing fields. Mark had been before and had an understanding of the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime, but to my shame my knowledge was very little. Considering this was only 40 years ago I cannot believe that these horrendous, violent and barbaric acts went unchallenged by the western world, especially after what had happened in the concentration camps of WW2. It took the Vietnamese to step in after 4 years of genocide for this to be stopped. Those responsible did not face trial until 25-35 years later and Pol Pots never faced trial and died of natural causes relatively recently, never having been held to account for the disgusting acts that he committed and the regime he oversaw.
S21 was a high school in central Pehnom Penh, it was taken over by the regime and was turned into a prison where intellectuals, academics, doctors and anyone deemed to be educated was taken for torture and eventually execution. They did not just murder the person but wiped out their entire family so they could not seek vengeance at a later date….. this includes children and babies.
In S21 you can see the cells that held the prisoners and there are pictures of the victims from when they were processed. They have told the life stories of several of those murdered, and have a display of their clothes, even the children’s.
It is truly chilling and hard to take in. They have the skulls and bones there of those executed. In some of the cells there are pictures taken by the Vietnamese liberators of corpses found in the rooms chained to bed or wall to capture evidence of the atrocities. There are fourteen graves in the centre of those who were found dead in their cells and pictures of some of those who were saved. There is the opportunity to meet and buy a book from a survivor at the end, although there are no words that can be found other than “I don’t know what to say, I’m so sorry for what you went through”.
If I thought that S21 was hard to see, there was nothing that could prepare me for going to the killing fields the next morning. We had a survivor called Maothel ask if we wanted a guide to which we graciously accepted. Maothel told us at 18 he managed to escape by running, he dodged bullets from AK47’s and people trying to capture him. All his family, his mum, dad, aunts, uncles, grandparents were academics, doctors or worked in law. They were all captured and murdered.
Before we went to S22 or the killing fields we had decided that we were not going to take any pictures, we felt it would be disrespectful to those who had been tortured and killed, however Maothel kept telling us to take pictures and share them. He wanted these atrocities shared so that everyone could see the devastation that had occurred, and wanted us to share his stories and the stories he would tell us.
Maothel the whole way around kept saying, “I still just don’t understand why this happened, why no one stepped in. How could anyone do this”, he was visibly tearful and understandably remained traumatised by what happened to him, his family and his people.
He described how they would rip the teeth out of people, make them eat their own faeces before killing them by smashing their skulls. They would rip babies from their mothers and hit their heads against a tree to kill them while the mothers were made to watch, before being raped and murdered themselves.
The stories are endless and brought me to floods of tears because it is just so unbelievable that not only did this happen just years before my birth, but nothing was done for so long!
Again at the end you meet other survivors, we asked if we could take their picture to share with their stories and they consented.
I know this is a very heavy read but I promised I would tell people their stories for them when I returned, and while triggering and traumatising this happened. It happened not that long ago by extremists, and while we are not there, it does not take a genius to see that we are becoming an ever more divided society with polar political extremes all over the world. We need to learn to disagree agreeably and come together before we go beyond the point of repair and we forget the lessons of the past.