A Day of Mixed Emotions

I got up, had breakfast and was on a motorbike taxi by 9 am. My first stop was a former school that the Khmer Rouge had converted into a concentration camp. Thousands upon thousands were tortured until they gave false confessions. They were then sent away to be murdered. About 20,000 passed through the prison and only 7 were found alive when the Vietnamese invaded.

I had been prepared for a strong emotional reaction by my friend Marion who, after having visited this same site, was overcome by emotions to the point of crying for 45 minutes. From her account I had some kind of idea what to expect. The school grounds were quite eerie, not because of how depressing the appearance of the yard, but because of how normal a place it looked. If cleaned up, it could be a school in any Asian country (reminded me of school designs in Japan and Korea).

The first wing I went to was used exclusively for torture. It was here that the Vietnamese found the prison's last victims, tied to bed frames and bludgeoned to death. The photos that they took were mounted in the same room that each of the bodies was found. The rest of the compound was similarly unsettling.

Another wing contained panels covered with pictures of nearly all of the prisoners. These people were ordinary peasants, teachers, engineers, students and those members of the regime suspected of treachery. Their faces looked stunned with a sort of disbelief in what was happening to them and those around them.

After walking through the former prison, I rode to the mostly infamous of the killing fields. It was here that the prisoners from the former school were sent to be executed. The fields were even more unsettlingly normal than the school yard. The atmosphere was as peaceful as the rice fields near Angkor Wat I visited a few days ago.

The focus of the site was a tall tower topped with a golden roof. This tower was erected to commemorate the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime. Inside it were over 8000 skulls disinterred in 1980. Only about half of the mass graves were dug up to produce these remains.

The mass graves themselves were located behind the monument tower in a grassy area. The dug up graves left square depressed areas that were easy to distinguish. It was here that executioners led prisoners from a nearby holding cell one at a time. Blindfolded, each prisoner was brought to their knees at which point they were stuck on the neck until unconscious. The executioner then cut their throat and threw them in the pit. The filling in of the graves was haphazard leaving some body parts uncovered.

While many thousands of people died in this camp, this was only the tip of the iceberg. In only a few years, almost 2 million people died due to starvation, sickness from malnutrition or murder by the Khmer Rouge. While it’s depressing and shocking to look into such a dark past, it serves to emphasize how positive the peace that now exists is. Yes, there is still corruption and countess other problems facing the country, but none of these problems compare to the numerous conflicts and revolutions that have devastated this country in recent history.

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The end of the day was almost strange when compared to the morning. I met up with the Aunt of one of my students. She is a Korean woman married to a French journalist. After meeting her, she suggested going for French food. All I could hear in my head were voices screaming "expensive" (I managed to bite my lip). We had food, wine and great conversation for a couple hours. I asked her all about her life and we talked about differences between Cambodia, Korea, Japan, France and Canada. I had managed to ignore prices (reasonable for home, ridiculous for Cambodia); fortunately for me and my out-of-control budget, the meal was on her. Phew!