S-21 and the Killing Fields

With the privilege of travel comes the responsibility to bear witness to the history of a place. Today our group visited S-21 and the Genocide Museum of the Killing Fields. I had read about the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge, and I knew only that Pol Pot was behind the significant loss of life during that time. In reality, I was under-prepared to experience visiting these two sites. S-21 is right in the middle of Phnom Penh. An old high school, this campus was transformed into a horrific detention center and prison where over 14,000 were detained and killed. Each of the four buildings there had their own purpose, and what was once a place of learning became a site of mass killings. Some of the classrooms were turned into interogation and torture rooms. Each of these rooms had a bed with shackles and a chair and desk where the Khmer soldiers would torture the prisoners and then force them to submit a written confession. Some classrooms were sectioned off into multiple smaller individual cells. To walk through the buildings, we passed hundreds of photographs of prisoners, many of whom were children. The Khmer Rouge did not discern between adults and children, and their sick motto was “to kill the grass, you must remove the roots.” The torture devices: boyonetts, hatchets, hammers, were on display as well. Many of those detained were not shot so the soldiers could save their ammunition. Blunt head trauma, bayonette slitting of throats, or beheadings were most common. The photos of the piles of skulls were horrific, and I kept thinking to myself: this happened in my lifetime.