Heart of Darkness

I spent Saturday in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Phnom Penh or PP isn't a very large city and many people skip it or just pass through on their way to Angkor and Siem Reap. For the most part, I would agree that it isn't worth a long visit. It's a nice walking city but not really exceptional.

That being said, the one reason to spend some time in PP is to visit the Killing Fields. Most of us are at least passingly aware of the Killing Fields and the history of genocide left by Pol Pot in the mid/late 1970s. I was only aware of the barest of details of this part of Cambodian history. The Fields were "discovered" in 1980, after Pol Pot "resigned" and took refuge near the Thai/Cambodian border.

A few facts - the Fields are located only 15 km outside of PP, 17000 people were exterminated at the camp between 1975-1978, according to our guide, the camp was one of 100s around the country but was the only one preserved since it was the largest and it is estimated that 2-3 million people were killed at the extermination sites - out of a population of 7 million.

I really shouldn't call it a camp since it is different than the extermination camps used by the Nazis, it was really just an extermination site. In this case, prisoners from Prison 21 (Tuol Sleng) were brought to the site after being detained and tortued at the prison. The Khmer Rouge regime arrested and eventually executed almost everyone suspected of connections with the former government or with foreign governments, as well as professionals, intellectuals and citizens of other ethnicities and religious figures.

Once brought to the site (crammed in the back of trucks), the victims were killed by bludgeoned to save on the cost of valuable bullets. Women and children were not spared either. There's a tree at the site that was used to beat the heads of children before being flung into an open burial pit.

Walking onto the site, the first thing you notice is the stupa built there in memorial of the victims. The stupa has glass panels from which you can see the many layers of the stupa, each with skulls and other bones of the victims gathered from the site. As we walked around, the second thing that struck me was the smell. There was a very cloying almost overly sweet smell there - whether it was just due to the season, I don't know, but I had the impression that this was peculiar to this location. The tour guide pointed out the mass graves and, since it was monsoon, he also pointed out that clothing, bones and teeth that were starting to rise out of ground again.

All of it was horrifying and I write about it because it should be remembered. The parallels to the horrors of WWII cannot be emphasized enough. The guide at one point said that the townspeople knew what was happening and yet did nothing and said nothing. This was eerily the exact thing that a guide said to me as I was walking around the Dachau concentration camp outside of Munich, Germany last year.

Although it was a gruesome place to visit - I felt like I could only honor the victims by seeing it and making sure I never forget.