What Cambodia still remembers

Hoping to get around to writing about my 4 days in the field in Mondulkiri soon. Until then I want to keep updating my blog. I'm really enjoying Cambodia so far. I love Phnom Phen and I'm excited to come back in several years and visit it again.

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February 28th, 2010

Today I paid my respect to Cambodian history with a visit to the genocide museum known as S-21. It was a secondary school that became the largest prison and torture facility of the Khmer Rouge in the 70’s.

If you are not familiar with the tragedy caused by the KR please take a couple minutes to, at least, read about it online. We are shockingly undereducated about the KR regime in the western world. I highly recommend reading “When Broken Glass Floats” to really understand what the people of Cambodia have survived. If you are planning a trip to Cambodia, reading it is a must.

From the outside S-21 does look a lot like an empty school, with four white buildings, three stories tall each. But when you enter the misused classrooms your perception quickly changes.

Some of the rooms are filled with hundreds of pictures of men, women, and children on display. The KR took meticulous records of everyone that entered the prison, including photographs.

Some rooms are empty except for the bars and shackles with which they restrained up to 100 children in a single classroom.

Some of the rooms are empty except for a large picture of the bodies found deserted and decaying when the Vietnamese liberated Phnom Phen.

Some rooms have poorly constructed brick and cement walls dividing the room, effectively creating 3’x6’ cells that held individual prisoners.

Some rooms have the torture equipment on display with artistic renditions painted of the horrors that occurred within the compound.

The two visuals that most strongly affect me, however, were not on display. They were not intentional, nor do I think they are noticed by many other visitors.

On the top floor of the first building are large rooms that were used as mass prison cells. I wandered the hall alone; most visitors seemed to stay on the ground floor. At the end of the hall was a room that only contained a single empty bed frame. I walked around the room thinking about how wrongly the ideals of the KR were upheld. Who were the KR soldiers that were responsible for enslaving their countrymen? As I turned back to the bed I noticed several thin, faded violet sticks placed in a hole in the bed-frame. Someone had burned incense on the bed.

The museum does an excellent job of remembering the thousands of victims of S-21, but I had not remembered the thousands of family members that still live with the loss of the victims. I felt ignorant for having forgotten. Mothers, sons, daughters, siblings remember and honor their loved ones now, only 35 years later. In 2010, the victims of the Khmer Rouge are still far from an unknown generation. For someone to visit S-21 in memory of a family member must cause excruciating pain. They see the rooms, the pictures, the torture devices on display and know that this is where their loved one spent their last days. Those little incense sticks touched me more deeply than any of the displays.

I moved on to the other buildings. I was quickly feeling ready to leave. In the 3rd building I headed up the stairs, still determined to visit all the floors and rooms. The 2nd floor was closed; the 3rd floor was similar to others. I was drawn to the very end of the hall by some familiar sounds. At the end there was a second flight of stairs leading back down. I looked up and saw about thirty bats clinging to the chipping cement walls, some sleeping and some squeaking. I suppose that most people would be deterred from using this staircase because of the bats, but I was curious, so I continued down. Near the ground floor I could see that the exit was closed off by a locked gate. The logical choice would be to then go back up the stairs to get out of the building, but for some reason I was still curious so I went all the way to the ground floor and looked around the bottom of the staircase. I was shocked by what I found.

A small room at the base of the stairs was open and it was full of clothes; dusty, crumbling, antique clothes. In another building there was a small glass case on display with some indistinguishable clothing which they said belonged to the prisoners that died in the prison, but the case was unremarkable. Lying in front of me were beautiful, decaying newsie hats, some small enough to fit a child; there was white, dust-coated lace; an ancient leather shoe where I could see how the owner had worn down the outside of the heals; and near the open window a pile of fresh, empty Angkor beer cans. This room was clearly not something the museum meant for people to see, and yet it wasn’t properly blocked off. The entrance to the staircase must be closed because they don’t want people seeing the room, but they hadn’t blocked off the top of the stairs.

In the first building I had been reminded of the victims’ families and their grief, here I was shown a little bit about who these victims were. Each item of clothing could tell a different story. I turned over the shoe and noticed the laces had been taken out and replaced with a strip of cloth. The beer cans were, of course, deeply disturbing in a different sense. The disrespect for the items in the room was disappointing, especially when the remains of these people are indistinguishable amongst the millions of bones in the killing fields outside of the city. If the clothes aren’t on display I think they deserve a respectable grave.

After a couple minutes I walked back up the stairs, crossed the 3rd floor hallway and left down the other staircase. I wonder how many people each day discover that room. I left the museum shortly afterwords and headed back into the sun to find a place to write in my journal, I didn’t think I had an appetite for lunch.