Adventures WorldRace SethBarnes Sponsorship Giving

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To read the first part of the story, check out “And so it begins…”
 
Some saw them as the lucky few; others saw them as the true victims.  They managed to avoid the fields, these students of Tuol Sleng.  Hard labor was not their fate; interrogation met its match behind these walls.  Oh the students of Tuol Sleng.  Oh this School of Terror.  What once was a suburban high school of Phnom Penh was now literally the “hill of the poison tree.”  One must accept the fate of such a place.  Where the “people go in, but never come out.”  Our brothers, our sisters, our dads, and our moms; our nieces, our nephews, our teachers, our friends; our teammates, our neighbors, our priests, and our kids-all tortured behind the walls of Tuol Sleng.

It is known that nearly 20,000 of our brothers and sisters entered Tuol Sleng.  Of these, only 6 are known to have survived.

From the moment you stepped foot through that door, you were stripped of all your rights and your rules and responsibilities were made clear.  These rules were painfully clear, dictating how you were to act, how you were to think, and how you responded to questioning.  You must accept you were a traitor because you were going to be treated as such. 

The goal of this School of Terror was to extract confessions from political prisoners before they were taken away for execution and let me tell you, it was not done in a gentle fashion.  No sitting down for coffee and discussing one’s past; not even starving them was ‘inhumane’ enough.  Tortured with battery-powered electric shocks, searing hot metal prods, knives and other terrifying implements, it comes as no surprise that many died before ever seeing the outside.  Despite these many deaths, outright killing was strictly frowned upon, as getting confessions down on paper first was the priority.

To this day, thousands of these confession files have survived, including 5,000 photographs.  These individuals have yet to be identified but these photos are living proof of the lives they lived and lost at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.

    
 

 
  
 
I urge you to take a moment to pray for these individuals.  Let them know their lives were not lost in vain.  Whether guilty or innocent, nobody deserves to have their life taken from them in such a manner.  The Lord, our God, is the only judge and I pray that He forgives us all for constantly trying to do His job for Him.  I pray for every life lost at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, at the hands of violence.  I pray we may be people of peace.

Stay tuned for “The end is in sight…or is it?” or read about it more at these great sources: