I Am Broken Part 1

I have never been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. I have read the stories, I have seen the pictures, and I have watched the videos. But nothing prepares you for being face to face with survivors. Or even worse, the ones who didn’t survive. Or, at least, that is what I was told.

Humans tend to be pretty prideful. Going into this day, I was confident that seeing memorials for the nearly three million Cambodians that were brutally murdered (including women and children) would not effect me.

How ignorant I was.

It started as a pretty normal day. Jacinda, Krystle and I left our compound around 9:45 for the Killing Fields, our first destination of the day. The thirty minutes it took to get there was uneventful. We decided that we were going to pray before we started walking through the memorial, which made the world of difference.

(Looks innocent from afar, huh?)

However, that did not stifle the horror of the massacre.

The back story is basically a power hungry Prime Minister, Pol Pot, came in after a civil war with Vietnam in the early 1970’s. He evacuated everyone out of the capital, Phnom Phen, and forced them into slavery in the rice fields throughout the country. However, the intellectuals like doctors, lawyers, teachers, and nurses were told to come back into the city. They were promised that they would get better jobs with better pay.

However, when they arrived, they were imprisoned, tortured, and eventually murdered. After all of the ‘high class’ Cambodians and their families were dead, they moved on to a broader spectrum. They even picked out people who wore glasses, just because they looked smarter than the rest.

The girls and I started at that Killing Field, when in reality, the story actually started in a high school that was transformed into a giant torture prison.

(A torture room, and one of 14 rooms that contained a corpse when this property was exposed. The corpse is pictured on the wall by the window, photographed as it was found.)

People were chained up like animals, and abused in horrible ways. It was a constant process, and the captives could count on their horrors to come alive everyday. There were even rules they had to follow during ‘interrogation’ or they would be beaten worse. The rules are shown in this picture:

So, after a while, the leaders of this horrible genocide realized that they needed a place to put all the bodies, and all the people who were no longer useful to them.

Now we are back full circle to the Killing Fields. While the main Killing Field Memorial in Phnom Phen does represent about 9000 souls, they believe there are about 20,000 skeletons in the ground there, and 387 more fields all over Cambodia full of the other 2,980,000 people.

Now stop for a minute. Think about how many people that is. That is 1% of America’s population. Imagine if a sadistic leader took over the U.S, and killed 1 out of every 100 people. Let’s get even closer to home. What if that one person was your husband? Or your child? Or your best friend? Or your mother, or your father?

Because for the people that survived the genocide of 1975-1979, that is their reality. 

Continued in Part 2...