The Killing Fields

Today Tom, Juan and I undertook some of the serious stuff by going to the notorious S21 prison and associated place where inmates were, to use a blunt but accurate phrase, finished off. It is obviously a very harrowing experience.


The site of the Killing Fields, which we visited first, is about 15km outside of Phnom Penh and actually looked quite pretty in the sunshine. There's a river, lake with lillies and trees and it is all very green and peaceful - an image shattered not just by the huge monument surrounding a glass cylinder full to the top with skulls but by your mind trying to envisage and make sense of what was committed there. One's imagination is stirred further as one notices fragments of clothing and bone poking out of the ground.


The incongruity of the bright sunshine and trees with the painted memory of the past was similar to what I experienced at Auchwitz (as opposed to Birkenau which was a more brutal landscape). I also started to get the same seething annoyance at the tourists taking umpteem photos and videos of the skulls, hardly seeming to pause to actually experience what it means. I have to say though I've mellowed a bit on this subject now, basically because everyone seems to do it and I guess if I'm honest I do have the temptation to document experiences and did take a couple of shots from further away (see above), so maybe I'm being hypocritical. However, while it's important to remember and share, it just still seems a bit disrespectful and unecessary to treat photgraphing human remains the same way as you might take photos of your (living) friends. At least I didn't see anyone posing with the skulls as in Auschwitz (look at me; 'arbeit mach frei!') it wasn't as bad as the tourists photographing cremation in Kathmandu.



The information boards scattered around for the most part seemed to lose something of their gravity in translation, plus many felt as though they were trying too hard to make the point, but one plaque in particular struck me as being quite arrestng in its simplicity. Placed next to a beautiful knotted tree it reads 'Magic Tree. The tree was used as a tool to hang the loudspeakers which make the sound louder to avoid the moan of victims while they were being executed."



We then went to the S21 prison or Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Tuol Sleng actually has a double meaning - 'poisonous hill' as well as 'mound for those who have guilt'. It had been a primary school before being wrapped in barbed wire and converted into a place of torture. This fact gives rise to some unforgettable images of exercise bars being used to hang people.





The final Auschwitz comparison comes from seeing the rows upon rows of mugshots of those killed and spotting the children already robbed of everything. Apparently girls and boys of 14 and 15 were trained up as the camp guards and these impressionable youth used to then commit the most evil deeds.



I think it is remarkable that, as far as I can ascertain so far, the genocide was indiscriminate of race in that there was no ethnic group specifically targeted and I wonder if this makes it unique?
It seems a bit shameful now but in a think it is explained by a release of emotional tension, but the three of us went out that night and got drunk. The bar/club we spent most of the night at: The Heart of Darkness.