I say unfortunately because obviously these are not happy places to visit. But similar to the reason that I went to the former concentration camp in Dachau not far from Munich, Germany years ago, I felt it was my duty (as a fellow human) to show respect to the millions who died during the era of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
What follows are photographs I took while at the Genocide Museum Tuol Sleng, the Former Office S.21 in “Kampuchea Democratic” 1975-1979. (It’s located in Phnom Penh in what used to be a high school complex.) This facility (and many others) were used for lodging the people while they were being tortured. Though people did die here; that was not its intended purpose.
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| This device was used for taking their photographs. |
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| The man on the left is one of the few survivors of S.21 left. |
The following pictures I took while visiting the killing field closest to FLO. There were many, many similar places in Cambodia during this time. This one was located on what used to be a Chinese cemetery (where there was an orchard of *longan trees).
The “typical” procedure was to blindfold the people, tell them that they were being relocated, take them to a field (or cave as a nice Canadian couple I met while in Siem Reap explained to me; they visited one in northern Cambodia), force them to kneel (adjacent to a previously dug hole), kill them (in many different ways), put their body in the hole, and . . . go get more people to kill. It was so incredibly horrible what they did.
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| This is very close to the killing field. |
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| See the skull? That’s where this killing field is located. |
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| This memorial houses many of the bones found in the numerous mass graves. |
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*From my Apple dictionary:
longan |ˈlô ng gən; ˈlä ng-| noun
an edible juicy fruit from a plant related to the litchi, cultivated in Southeast Asia. • The plant is Dimocarpus longan, family Sapindaceae.
ORIGIN mid 18th cent.: from Chinese lóngyǎn, literally ‘dragon’s eye.’