Warning: This blog talks about some hard things and has some hard photos.
In 1975, a genocide in Cambodia started. The Khmer Rouge Regime, with Pol Pot as it’s leader, caused some awful things to happen. In four years, they killed between 1.5 million to 3 million people.
While I was in Cambodia I had the grievous honor to go to S-21 (a school converted to a prison/torture space) and one of the killing fields/mass graves where they threw the dead bodies or people they wanted to mass kill.
The first one I went to was S-21.
As I was listening to my audio tour and walking through it, It didn’t hit me really hard surprisingly. However, the days that followed the things I had seen and heard stayed with me.
Here are some things in the prison that stood out to me:
-They had the tombs of the 11 people who were the last victims. When a Vietnamese combat photographer found the place because of the stench of death, these 11 people were horrifically beaten to death and left unburried.
-With Comrade Duch leading at S-21, the regime created detailed documents about their victims including taking their picture. At the end of it when families were looking through their loved ones, they had to look through all those photos to see if their loved ones were among it. I also got to see those faces: men, women, and children.
-It was extremely inhumane. Dehumanized in so many ways. Tortured by many aggressive means to find whatever information they wanted.
-The leaders had rules for the prisoners–Not being allowed to cry out during torture was one of them.
-No one was left out–men, women, AND children. In fact, babies were taken from their mothers and killed.
-The torture was horrendous. At the museum they had photos that a survivor painted those showed some means of torture as well as some of the instruments of it.
Here are the 11 tombs.
Some of the photos of the victims.
Those little L’s are where some prisoners were held.
This is a monument. On the plaques are the names of those that lost their names.
Then next week I went to the killing fields not far from S-21 where they brought the dead or brought people to be killed.
Here is one of the mass graves at the killing fields.
This is a tree they killed children on.
Some human remains from an excavation in the killing fields.
Here are some of my thoughts:
-It is amazing to me what a person created in the image of God can do to another person created also in the image of God. The scary thing is, to an extent, humanity, given the right circumstances can commit any atrocity–especially if they go along with it without standing up to those doing the wrong thing.
-At the end of the tour, they talked about how this monument is a memory to the world. And now, those who had visited S-21 are also that memorial so that something like this doesn’t happen again. Sadly, in this fallen world it probably will–but we need to stand up for the fallen, the broken, the beaten, the untouchables–become a defender.
However, it doesn’t have to be just in something as big as a genocide. Sometimes it is seeing one unseen person that needs to be seen–it is up to us to see them and to love them like Jesus did.
