This Happened In Our Lifetimes??!?!!!

After escaping the crowds at Angkor Wat, I retreated to Cambodia's capital city, Phnom Penh. The major sites here are heavy. Very heavy, but incredibly important, and I'm happy I saw them.

The sites revolve around the atrocities that befell the lovely Cambodian people in the mid 1970s when a maniac named Pol Pot ruled the country with a death grip under his regime, the Khmer Rouge. In the name of Communism, he sought to destroy all free thinkers and intellects in the country, ultimately carrying out a 4-year genocide that resulted in the deaths of 25% of all Cambodians - 1 in 4 Cambodian men, women & children were executed between 1975 and 1979. Causes for execution included speaking a foreign language and even wearing eye glasses. It was a sick, sick time, and those who worked for the Khmer Rouge were forced to carryout heinous murders on their own people or face execution themselves.

Thankfully, I met a nice American girl and two fun Turkish guys on my bus trip from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, and we decided to take on our visits to the dark places that recount the story of the Khmer Rouge together. Our first stop was The Killing Fields. This is an area just on the outskirts of town where executions were carried out. Since the Khmer Rouge was run out of Cambodia, over 17,000 bodies have been exhumed, with many mass graves yet untouched. There's a monument at the entrance that houses over 8,000 skulls and features piles of the clothing that hadn't yet decomposed in the mass graves. And under the category of "truly horrifying," we learned that the Khmer Rouge was too poor to provide gas or even guns & bullets to the executioners who worked here, sometimes being told to kill as many as 300 people a day. So instead, these executioners used hammers, shovels, hoes and the like to kill person after person after person after person. I've never thought about anything so evil and ugly.

From there we visited S-21, a high school in Phnom Penh that was turned into a prison and interrogation center that housed people before they were sent to the Killing Fields for their ultimate extinctions. The Khmer Rouge photographed some of the atrocities that happened in this place, and also kept a photo log of all the thousands of men, women & children who passed through, and today these photos hang on the walls of the school, retelling the story of what occurred here. It's positively chilling as you look into the nightmare photos, and see the same tile floor you're standing on, the same concrete walls that stand behind you, etc. It all really happened right there only a few short decades ago. At the height of this site's usage by the regime, it claimed an astonishing 100 victims a day, most who died from torture techniques used during interrogations.

I'm reading a book right now that's sort of considered required reading for visitors to Cambodia. It's called, "First They Killed My Father," and is written by a girl who was 5 when the Khmer Rouge took over. It's a fantastic read, and anyone interested in gaining more understanding of this ridiculous atrocity should check out the book. It's also chilling now to interact with older Cambodians...they lived through this. Were they Khmer Rouge (by force or by choice)? Did they lose loved ones? How did they survive? So many things I now wonder as I look into their eyes. I also look at the beautiful Cambodian children differently, with such thanks in my heart that they are growing up in their country as it should be -- with freedom, hope, security, possibility, education, laughter, innocence.

God Bless Cambodia.
Mere