First, we visited S-21, once a school, once a military prison, now a remembrance museum for approximately 20,000 people tortured and killed under Pol Pot's directive in this facility alone. During his rule, somewhere between 1.7 and 2.5 million people lost their lives.
The floors of S-21 are tiled orange and white, tarnished by dirt and stains that I had to constantly convince myself weren't blood. Pol Pot's "combatants" kept meticulous records, so photographs exist of nearly every person who went into S-21 and never came out - often another picture exists of them after death. These photographs are set in rows on plastic-encased boards in one section of the four-building compound.
As I passed a tour guide, she was pointing to a photograph of a man splayed out on the floor in a puddle of blood, a floor that had the same tile as the room we were in. She spoke softly, "some were killed in the interrogation rooms, some out in the courtyard, and some in this very room." She pointed at the floor. A girl standing next to me jumped back as though his body might still be there.
The cells were windowless closets - brick or heavy wood - and the walkways were encased with concertina wire to prevent suicides of desperation. They would shackle your feet and tie your hands behind your back. A large pole in the center courtyard, once used by the schoolchildren for physical education, was used to suspend you upside down until you lost consciousness. They would submerge your head in a bucket of filthy water to bring you back, and resume questioning. The interrogation would end when you died.
(THE SECURITY OF REGULATION 1. You must answer accordingly to all my questions - Don't turn them away. 2. Don't try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me. 3. Don't be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution. 4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect. 5. Don't tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution. 6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all. 7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders, if there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting. 8. Don't make false pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor. 9. If you don't follow all the above rules, you shall get lashes of electric wire. 10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.)
When the museum was opened for visitors in 1979, a Cambodian woman examining the photographs learned the fate of her brother, missing for years.
If you survived S-21 interrogation, or were believed to have no useful information, you were trucked to a location on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. Here you would be murdered, piled in trenches and buried. The killing fields.
("Magic Tree...the tree was used as a tool to hang a loudspeaker which make sound louder to avoid the moan of victims while they were being executed.")
Now lush and green, dozens of dips in the landscape indicate excavation sites, where many desiccated bodies were exhumed. Still, when it rains and the land shifts, bits of fabric that were once clothing, along with fragments of bone and teeth, excavate themselves to the muddy surface. We found several teeth and the ground was peppered with scraps of cloth.
In the center of the fields is a tall stone structure with almost twenty levels of shelves, packed with skulls.
On a wall in the stairwell at S-21, amidst similar sentiment, one person scrawled in bold marker, "Don't let shit like this EVER happen again, Please!" Another wrote, "When this was a prison, nobody learned, when this was a school, nobody died."
Other things happened today, but they do not matter.
