Day 47: Sad places, Cambodia (February 23, 2011)

Warning:  This post is going to contain some depressing stories and disturbing photos.  Don't read the second half if you don't want to be sad.

To make up for being such a laze-about yesterday (I slept for another three hours after I made my post!) I got out and did a lot today.  I'll start with the fun things, then will depress you by recounting my visits to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (aka the S-21 prison) and the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center (aka the Killing Fields).

Today I graduated from riding in the back of a tuk-tuk and rode on the back of a moped to get around town.  It's a little cheaper that way and everyone rides a moped here.  I insisted on wearing a helmet, but most of the locals do not, even when they are squished 3 or 4 to bike.  After my initial nervousness, it was fun, and I'm looking forward to someday being a passenger on a real bike. 

"Classic" Phnom Penh from the turn of the (last) century.

More classic P.P.

From a temple near my hotel.

The way traffic flows in Cambodia is a lot different than in the States.  The roads are all like the video game Frogger, except the traffic goes in all four directions and somehow no one gets squashed.  I think they manage it because everyone drives slower, the vehicles are a lot smaller and can maneuver better, and people don't seem to treat their vehicles as an extension of their personal space, so there's not much jostling for position.  I hope Cambodia (and other places where mopeds are popular) don't all switch to a car society; their roads can handle all the little bikes, but won't be able to handle as many cars.

Lunch break at an outdoor food vendor's cart.

The middle of my day was spent at the National Museum, which houses more art from the greater Angkor region, plus some more modern pieces.  While both this museum and the one in Siem Reap contain tons of statues and other carvings, neither had any painted works.  I wonder if the ancient Khmers did not paint, or if there's another reason no paintings now exist, like they disintegrated in the climate, or they were all destroyed by invaders.  I'll look it up whenever I'm in possession of my Art Through the Ages book again.

On either side of the museum and lunch were the S-21 prison and the Killing Fields.  I actually went to the Killing Fields first (because it's cooler in the morning) but I'll talk about it second.

First, a tiny bit of background for those who don't know anything about the Khmer Rouge.  They were (in name at least) a communist group that had been around since I think the 1960s, and they gained a lot of followers in the early 1970s during Cambodia's civil war.  Somehow they gained enough followers -- armed followers, that is -- that they were able to take over a number of cities around the countryside, and in 1975, took over Phnom Penh and forced everyone in the city (over 1 million people) to leave town, leaving everything behind.  The city was completely deserted for nearly 4 years, except for a few small pockets, like S-21, which was originally a high school but became a prison, torture center, and execution center for about 10,000 Cambodians.  Of everyone who was sent there, only 7 men survived, found still alive when the prison was liberated.

S-21 is more or less in the same condition it was when it was liberated, although it's been cleaned up.  And by that, I mean the blood and everything that goes along with it has been scrubbed clean.  Some of the prison rooms have been converted to display rooms, some left as they were.  Here are some shots of the prison left as it was:

A schoolroom converted to prison cells.

Once a children's playground, then the prison gallows.

A prison room, where a dead prisoner was found upon S-21's liberation.

I've been to the Dachau Concentration Camp outside of Munich, Germany.  I had a really good tour guide, so I learned a lot there and it was very powerful and moving.  But one thing that was missing from that tour was a sense of who the people were who lived and died at that camp.  By comparison, S-21 does not have as much historical explanation during the tour, or as detailed descriptions of what every single room was for.  What it does have, though, are incredibly detailed records about everything that on at the site, including photos of everyone who passed through its doors, and photos of every dead body.  Really sad and disturbing photos incoming...

There were thousands of photos like these.  Men, women, children.  I only captured a small sample with my camera.  A few moments after I took the following shot, another woman touring S-21 stopped to look at the same photo, then started crying.

 

The S-21 museum has very few signs, but one of them is the most unnecessary sign EVER:

While many prisoners died at S-21 itself, every month, truckloads of people from there and elsewhere were sent about 10 miles southwest of Phnom Penh to Choeung Ek, one of the many Killing Fields that sprang up around Cambodia in the 1970s, where people were sent to be killed by the Khmer Rouge.  Dozens of mass graves at this site have turned up over 17,000 bodies, some of which are still in their graves and others of which have been moved to a memorial stupa built on the site.  The Killing Fields weren't as horrific to tour as the S-21, mostly because everything now looks like fields and woods, with a large temple in the center. 

Ugh!  :(

The temple where many of the deceased now rest.

Unlike, say, European concentration camps, there was no actual work or even the pretext of work done at these places.  As soon as they arrived, prisoners were herded off the trucks, blindfolded, then bashed in the back of the head next to an open mass grave.  Supposedly, the people running the sites took pains to keep their existence a secret from people living and working nearby, such as by playing loud sounds over loudspeakers to drown out the noise of groans and screams.  But I don't believe that.  You can't watch trucks of people constantly being sent to one spot, with no one ever leaving, and no food ever going in, or garbage coming out.  And given that every "free" person in Cambodia at that time was either in the Khmer Rouge army or was a starving and forced laborer in a rice paddy, it's not like anyone would have been able to protest the existence of the Killing Fields.  Not if they wanted to avoid them, that is.

So that was it.  That was today.  Very sobering, very sad.