Day 2

Yesterday was difficult, emotionally more than physically. We started the day by going to the Killing Fields here in Phnom Penh, only one of a few hundred execution grounds used by the Khmer Rouge. With all the mass graves, the whole idea was so overwhelming, it was difficult to really understand what these depressions in the earth and the bits of bone sticking up from the dirt underneath the bench I was sitting on really meant. We had personal electronic audio tours, so we could go at our own pace, and sometimes I would just sit and contemplate the individual people, with their own personalities, lives, and dreams that met their end in such terrible, horrific ways in this place. I could only ask, “Why? Why would this happen? How could people actually do this to one another?”

The hardest place for me was the Killing Tree, so named because soldiers would bash infants’ heads against it in front of their mothers, and then throw them into the grave. How could people do this to anyone, especially children? I’ve asked that a lot already this trip, not just about the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, but also about human trafficking. How could you inflict so much pain on a child? But I’ve also learned not to judge—what would my actions be if I were in the place of a Khmer Rouge youth soldier, brainwashed and pressured and scared? People changed so much under such circumstances, the soldiers and the oppressed people. But looking from an eternal perspective, it still would have been better to do the right thing than to bow down to the evil influences. Easy to say in a calm, reflective place rather than a hellish one.

The Killing Fields and stories from the Khmer Rouge also had greater impact because I had previously read When Broken Glass Floats, which is a record of a women’s memories of growing up in the Khmer Rouge. I just don’t know how you could endure so much.

After the Killing Fields, I was emotionally done, but we only had a brief respite during lunch and then headed to Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21, a notorious prison used during the Khmer Rouge. Our guide was about 15 years old when the Khmer Rouge took control of Phnom Penh. The stories he was able to share were terrible—other stories were too horrific for him to relate and live through again. Almost everyone here has post-traumatic stress disorder, whether from their own experiences, or second-generation.

I lasted through most of S-21, with the pictures of the tortured and mangled bodies found as the Khmer Rouge fled, and room after rooms of mug shots of the prisoners—so many who were tortured for months and then were taken to the Killing Fields. We met one of the eleven survivors of the prison, and he still bore physical evidences of the torture. The only reason why he survived was because the typewriter broke during his “confession” of being an agent of the C.I.A., a lie he had to tell in order to stop the torture. When we got to the rooms of the torture instruments, I just went outside. I wanted to emotionally disgorge myself, like when you eat too much food or drink too much water that your stomach is in so much pain, you want to throw up and relieve the suffering. Instead we tried to process it, talking about what we saw when I just wanted to think about something else for a bit. But the point of these museums of the Khmer Rouge, the Holocaust, the Chinese Revolution, etc. is to not forget, to gain knowledge so that these things will never happen again. I just pray that nothing like this will ever happen again. People said that with the Holocaust, that it would never happen again, but it keeps happening, over and over again.

Anyway, a pretty depressing, heavy day, that could only be conquered with the knowledge that justice and healing is achievable, because God loves His children.

--Alice Bailey