After a 10-15 minute tuk tuk ride from our hostel in Phnom Penh we arrived at the Killing Fields, a memorial dedicated to the over one million people killed during the Cambodian genocide.
The genocide lasted from 1975-1979, killing 2 million people, a quarter of Cambodia’s population.
On April 17th 1975, the Khmer Rouge army overthrew the Lon Nol government. They took control over Phnom Penh, forcing everyone to abandon their homes and to move out to the country side. The man responsible for this drastic change in the lives of many people was called Pol Pot. He was the leader of the Khmer Rouge. His ultimate goal was to create a pure, communist, agratian utopia, in which the Angka (government) ruled with an iron fist. In the following four years, millions of Cambodians lost their lives through hard physical labor in inhumane conditions, starvation, disease, torture, rape and brutal mass executions.
One of the many things we saw were four mass graves. Objectively, it looked like a flower bed with only a few small plants growing in it. But knowing that the bones of between 20 and 80 (depending on the grave) corpses of brutal executions were resting here is terrible and deviastating, to say the least. We also saw two historically significant trees: the Baby Tree and the Magic Tree. The Baby Tree was used to murder infants by smashing their heads against the tree trunk. The reason for this atrosity is one of Pol Pots sayings: “To kill the grass, you must remove the root”.
The Magic Tree was used to hang speakers from its branches to play a certain melody for the people to hear every evening. This music was used to drown out the screams of victims being tortured and killed. The killing tools were gardening tools such as hoes, crowbars, hammers, machetes and more. To think that something as pleasant as a song could be used to disguise the slaughter of many innocent people.
Visiting the Killing Fields was very saddening, to say the least, learning about the desolating horrors of Cambidia’s past.
Afterwards, we visited Toul Sleng, also known as S21, as well. Seeing actual blood stains on the floors of the prison cells was more than I and the others could handle. I can only imagen how torturous the prisoners lives were there, in many ways.
Visiting the Killings Fields and the Toul Sleng Prison and writing about it was important, but also really difficult; especially because I was speechless many times…
We can only hope that we remember and learn from the past to prevent atrosities like this from happening again.
-Miriam G