Present location: Battambang, Cambodia
When we were in Phnom Phen, we visited the Tuol Sleng, Genocide Museum. This place was a high school until the 1970s, when the Khmer Rouge, a Cambodian Communist movement, converted the school into a torture prison. In that school over 10,000 men, women, and children were imprisoned and tortured. Only seven survived.
The Khmer Rouge targeted the learned, the doctors, those in government, the artists, and others who were educated. Convinced they were part of a conspiracy the Khmer Rouge soldiers would not stop the torture until a confession was made or rather made up.
After severe unspeakable torture for many months, the prisoners regardless of there “confession” would be taken to be executed and thrown into mass graves. These mass graves were not far from the prison and have adopted the name of The Killing Fields.
It was truly horrific. During the reign of the Khmer Rouge, one third of the population was wiped out, over 3 million Cambodians. The Khmer Rouge not only wiped out generations, they crippled the country and set it back hundreds of years by killing so many educated and those who were pushing development forward .
I am sitting here searching for words. So much to process and take in. To know if I had been standing in some of these very spots 30 years ago people were being torture and killed.
This is why it has taken me so long to write this blog. Such brutality is truly horrific. It is a lot to process.
A place that once was filled with students learning and them being nurtured, was turned into a place where knowledge was condemed and even worthy of torture and death. To oppose The Khmer Rouge and have any other thought, meant death. Meant being ripped from your family. Meant losing everything.
Many joined the Khmer Rouge claiming they did not have a choice. Although they say they did not want to do it, it was kill or be killed.
How do people get to such a point of brutality?
I recently watched a documentary on the Killing Fields. One of the interviews was with a man who was a Khmer Rouge soldier. He was a loving father, husband, and friend. He joined the Khmer Rouge because he felt it would be the best thing to protect himself and his family. He was a bit reluctant to tell his story as it caused him much shame and grief, but he felt through sharing what he did that it would help him with his Karma.
He was stationed at the Killing Fields. At first it was hard to kill, to see his own people: men women and children piled in mass graves, to handle the smell of the corpses. But after a while he just got used to it. He said the smell just became common.
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men [and women] do nothing.”
– Edmund Burke
