Killing Fields

This has to be one of the most depressing experiences of my travels so far, yet it was something I will never regret seeing. Today, I met up with a few other traveler's from New Zealand, Sweden and Denmark to take in the Killing Fields and a high school in the suburbs of Phnom Penh, converted by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge into a death and torture center, and renamed 'S21' in 1975.

S21..

The killing fields were a very tragic place where the bodies of 19,000 civilians were found in mass graves, with many more uncovered, their clothing emerging from the soil all around as you walked. Even though it was a sunny day, the place was very quiet and chilling, much like Aushvitz when I visited, but this had much more impact due to it's timescale within my lifetime. Many of the clothes were relatively modern, with 70's patterns and styles. Many of the skulls of the exhumed were on display in a temple, with many of them bearing scars showing how they died by blows to the head. I didn't take any photos of this area- it didn't feel right taking them of unburied people.

S21...

After, we moved onto to S21, which had even more impact. Many of the former classrooms had been converted into torture chambers, and were still as they were discovered by the Vietnamese army in '79. The rooms which were the most upsetting were simply rows of endless portrait pictures of the prisoners, taken by the Khmer Rouge as they arrived, all of whom died within days of torture, giving in to false confessions of being an intellectual, educated or a capitalist (enemies of the state). The worst part of all this were the rows of pictures of children as young as 5, looking so scared.

As someone wrote on one of the walls there;

'When this was a school, no-one died, when this was a torture center, no-one learned'.

S21....

That's it for now.. I'll be hanging around Phnom Penh for a few days with some of the friends I've met before heading up to the lost city of Angkor, to see the best of what people can achieve, rather than the worst.

S21

S21.