Cycling The Road Less Travelled

Unfortunately, Cambodia’s recent history is one that is shocking, dark and horrific. Years of civil war along with conflicts in neighboring countries have brought much destruction and suffering to the country.

Today, we decided to go see the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. Between the years of 1975 and 1978, the Kmer Rouge massacred over 17,000 people at this extermination camp. Many of the victims were bludgeoned to death to avoid wasting bullets. One hundred twenty nine mass graves were found. Over 8000 skulls, arranged by sex and age, are kept behind glass in the Memorial Stupa. It’s a powerful reminder of the atrocities that took place here. Also in the Stupa is a pile of tattered clothes. On the very top was a shirt or a dress with red and blue butterflies; it made me think of a little girl or young woman who must have felt very pretty wearing it. Sometimes it’s not the most obvious things that strike you the most when visiting such a place.

We struggled to make sense of it all, something to explain the horrors that took place in this field. There is none. It’s humanity at its worse.

Later the same day, we went to the Tuol Sleng Museum in Phnom Penh. The building was a high school before the Kmer Rouge turned it into a prison. What was once an institution for learning had become a place of imprisonment and torture. It is now a museum and grim reminder of the atrocities that took place here just a short while ago. The walls are lined with photos depicting torture and broken bodies. You get a small sense of the magnitude of this crime when you look at the endless sea of mug shots. When we looked at these images, we couldn’t help but think that had we been born in Cambodia, we could have been two of the frightened faces in those pictures. How could this have happened in our lifetime?

We left the museum in silence. We didn’t speak for a long time, both of us reeling from the images we had just seen. What can you say? How do you make sense of that? As we walked back, we kept looking at the older faces we passed on the street. What atrocities have they seen? How did they manage to survive? How many family members did they loose? Were they a Kmer Rouge combatant? As difficult and disturbing as it is, we do recommend visiting both these places. It’s important to remember these events if we are to prevent them from ever happening again.