A bus took us from the charming Battambang to Phnom Penh, a drive of around 5 hours. Jessie and James had done some research and booked us into a hostel called Lovely Jubbly Villa. When we arrived in Phnom Penh (hereinafter to be referred to, at least occasionally, as PP) I asked the pack of tuk tuk drivers to take us to Wubbly Jubbly. Everyone laughed at my mistake but honestly, I like my version better. 😘 Our tuk tuk driver must have jumped the queue to claim us because he ended up in a shouting match with the other drivers, insisting on taking us. We were indifferent – as long as we got to our hostel we didn’t really care who drove us. We made plans with him to go to the Killing Fields the next day for a fee of 20,000 and agreed to meet him at 10 next morning.
Turns out “Lovely Jubbly” means excellent; delightful; and our hostel was. Theresa and I got a queen size bed in a private room with our own bathroom for the lovely jubbly price of about $20/night and J & J took dorm beds upstairs. As it was a hot day, we spent the afternoon relaxing at the pool, drinking an iced tower of cheap Angkor beer.
After speaking with the front desk, they cautioned us that some unscrupulous tuk tuk drivers were known to agree to a price for the transport to and from the Killing Fields and S-21, and then once there, double their price; and if the riders didn’t agree, they’d leave them at the Killing FIelds fending for themselves and trying to find a ride back. So taking their advice, we booked a tuk tuk through the hostel for 16,000 kip to leave the next morning at 10:30.
In the morning, Theresa went out front to let the first tuk tuk driver know we had changed our plans. He was very angry and began shouting. She calmly walked away, and we waited another half hour for our arranged driver to arrive. When he did, we hopped into the tuk tuk only to realize the first guy was still there waiting for us. He began cursing at us, shouting obscenities and spitting on the ground. Not pleasant.
We arrived first at S-21, originally a school which was converted into a prison, known as Tuol Sleng. The prison is now the genocide museum. We purchased the audio tour, which was amazing. FIlled with facts, information, stories of survivors and those who did not survive, it told the chilling and horrific tale of the Khmer Rouge’s bloody regime and genocide of the Cambodian people from 1974 to 1979 under Pol Pot.
The Khmer Rouge was initially welcomed by the Cambodians, as they had been under communist rule and experiencing a civil war and the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian’s own, promised freedom for all. However, Pol Pot and his henchmen very quickly began emptying out the entire city of Phnom Penh and many other cities practically overnight, marching the inhabitants out to the country to live communally and grow rice.
Under the Khmer Rogue, an agrarian utopian, classless society was the goal. All things were abolished such as money, education and religion. Private businesses were seized. Hospitals closed. Temples and churches were boarded up or demolished. The family unit was disbanded. Ownership of land was forbidden. Factories were destroyed. Buddhist monks and Christian clergy were killed. Everyone was forced into slave labor and made to build their own shelters. Many- especially those from the cities with education and money, the intelligentsia and even those who simply wore glasses- were taken to be interrogated, tortured and eventually transported to the Killing Fields to be murdered. S-21 operated as one of the headquarters for torture, processing over 19,000 victims.
Classrooms were converted into torture chambers on the first floor and upstairs, primitive sleeping cells. Waterboarding, beatings with farm implements and tools such as axes, hammers and spikes, and submerging prisoners into vats of human excrement while hanging upside down were methods used to coerce “confessions” from the prisoners. Most prisoners agreed to whatever their captor accused them of – many signed confessions of being members of the CIA of the United States or the KGB -organizations that the prisoners had never even heard of, much less belonged to.
Men, women and children were shackled to the floor by the ankles with heavy chains. If their chain made any noise, even while sleeping, the guards would beat them mercilessly. The detailed descriptions of torture, depravity and cruelty brought me to tears many times during the tour. It was so excruciatingly difficult to hear, see and be in such a dark, haunted and terrible place – even in full daylight.
Those who survived their torture at S-21 were eventually transported to the Killing Fields to be executed for their coercion with the enemy or association with various prohibited groups based on their forced confessions. We toured this next, at a location a few miles outside of the city.
Most of the structures such as the office, truck stop, tool storage room and more that had been built at the Killing Fields are no longer standing, as they were destroyed for firewood and building material after the Fields were closed. There is a large memorial stupa built to honor the estimated 1.75-3 million who died due to starvation, disease and murder by Pol Pot and his men.
Truckloads of blindfolded prisoners from S-21 were brought to this site in the middle of the night to be disposed of. We learned about the brutal mass murders, and how many of the deaths were brought about by beatings due to the high cost of bullets. One directive read, “Bullets not to be wasted.”
Most prisoners, still blindfolded, were lined up or forced to kneel on the edge of what would soon be their grave, and bludgeoned until they fell into the pit, dead or nearly dead. They were then covered with DDT to hasten the decomposition and make room for more bodies. Evidence of nearly 9,000 bodies was found at this killing field alone.
Everywhere we walked were signs saying “do not step on bones”. Strips of clothing from the dead below he earth can be seen everywhere in the fields, as the rains disturb the bones, teeth and scraps of clothing still buried under the land. In this photo you can see human bones and bits of fabric that have come to the surface.
But for me, the most horrifying part of the tour, and one that brought me to tears, was seeing the tree against which babies’ heads were smashed after being swung by their feet into the trunk of the tree.
The photo below shows another tree, known as The Magic Tree. A speaker was hung from this tree and blared music loudly to cover the sound of the victims cries as they were being executed and dying.
After walking through the Fields, I went into the stupa, to discover it was filled with over 5000 skulls of the victims of Choeung Ek (the name of the killing field). They were displayed, color coded and categorized, showing how the victim had died. Blunt force. Bullet. Smashed skull. Broken neck. And they were divided into age groups: 0-10 years old, 21-30 and so on.
After four years of rule and mass destruction by the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese stormed the country to free the Cambodians from Pol Pot’s rule in 1979.
We all stumbled back to the tuk tuk in a daze only to see our tuk tuk driver from the morning in the parking lot with another fare, and he shouted out a few more obscenities when he saw us. A perfect ending to the day. We were drained, distraught and exhausted emotionally – and headed back to our hostel to contemplate the pure evil we had all seen today. It was such a tough day of abominable atrocities – so hard to believe it had happened while i was in high school 8000 miles away, blithely unaware of the heinous crimes being committed on a daily basis on the other side of the world, in a country called Cambodia. Nearly 25% of the population of the country at the time had been annihilated
There isn’t a family in Cambodia that is unscathed by this tragedy. Yet the human condition is that we persist. We move forward. We grow. And, hopefully, we learn from our mistakes.
For more information or to learn more about this tragic event in history, I recommend the book or the movie, “First They Killed My Father” and the movie, “The Killing Fields”.
Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn. Robert Burns.
