It was our second day in Cambodia, Sunday October 18th. As a squad we loaded ourselves up onto two buses and set off for a day of sight seeing before we were all sent off in different directions for ministry.
We went first to Tuol Sleng, a site that was used for mass genocide from 1975 to 1979 by the Khmer Rouge. It was designed for the detention, interrogation, torture, and killing of those held there. Ironic that it was once a school and students, teachers, educated persons, trades people, women, children and more were held and murdered there. A large wooden structure that was once used for exercise for students at the school was used for hanging prisoners and torturing them for information. The number of those imprisoned there stands around 14,000. There were seven survivors.
This number of dead does not include the children also killed by the Khmer Rouge; babies heads were smashed against trees by Khmer Rouge solderis in nearby fields, aptly and sickly named The Killing Fields. Hundreds of children torn from their parents grasp, and coldheartedly slain in order to prevent them avenging the unjust death of their families.
We walked into the rooms where Cambodians had been tortured until death. I stood beside a metal-framed bed that once a “prisoner” was once strapped to. A photograph on the wall left no illusions to my imagination what the bed would have looked like with a person in it, hooked up to the device now sitting idly on the bed frame.
We walked through room after room of cell where innocent people had been imprisoned for months and tortured beyond belief. Their blood still stained the cells, floors, and walls.
I walked up staircases that thousands had been carried up. The stark reality of what went on there weighed heavily on my heart. As I climbed step after step, I choked back tears, while in my ears I could almost hear the screams and pleas for mercy that passed through the lips of those dragged up those stairs. I stood behind the barbed wire that kept detainees from being able to commit suicide, the barbed wire that kept those imprisoned there from leaving the nightmare they lived each day.
I was guided around these buildings by a Cambodian from the local YWAM. He looked me in the eyes and explained to me what the rooms were for, what the significance of each place was. There were rooms full of photographs. He and I stared into the eyes of the adult and child soldiers of the Khmer Rouge. We also looked upon the faces of the Khmer Rouge’s victims. Hundreds and hundreds of photographs. Pictures of living and dead, pictures of people tortured and starved to their end. Some of them mural photographs, enlarged so that the eyes of the prisoners looking back at me were life-size. Eye to eye with a dead man it hit me – it was someone’s job to take every single picture, to develop every roll of film, to process every single photograph. One by one, someone looked upon the faces of the dead, someone ran those prints through every chemical and water wash necessary to get the full picture of what evil looks like. Through the eyes of a Khmer photographer the inhumanity and malevolence of Pol Pot was preserved for generations to see. I put myself in their shoes for a moment, put myself in the darkroom with all of those dead eyes looking back at me from the water rinse, from the drying racks for photographs, and my stomach turned and my eyes burned with fury and anguish.
Family lines were wiped clean.
Generations were lost in the hands of the Khmer Rouge.
Knowledge and wisdom were destroyed along with the bodies that held them.
And yet, a young Cambodian man stood there and told me as much as he could about the place, without flinching, without crying, without shame. It is his country’s history, not his. His future is as clean and bright as yours and mine.
That is beauty.
A man can look in the face of such wicked devastation and know that he is not defined by his country’s past, that he can laugh honestly and love freely.
That is what the redeeming love of Jesus Christ is all about. Hope for the hopeless, dancing instead of mourning, joy instead of ashes.
