Today was the day I was looking forward to as well as really nervous about - killing fields and S-21.
This is one of the darkest, saddest but most incredible days we've had in south east Asia and we will explain in detail as much as possible (so this blog could be a bit sad and slightly graffic)
Last night we organised meeting Pat and Jen in the morning outside our hotel, so we've got a private tuk tuk to take us all the places we wanted. Our first stop was the killing fields, this is one of many killing fields scattered across the country and was one of the most haunting places we had been to. We started the day (with the headset guide) with a quick intro and onto the few sign posts that explain about the buildings that were once there and that are now destroyed. These included the truck stop, where the 60 - 300 people a day would be dropped off, the detention cell, where people were held before execution and the chemical shed, which held the DDT and other chemicals to help mask the smell and also to kill any surviving people who had been put in the grave! After this you head to a shallow pit which now has a roof covering it, this is the largest grave they found on the site with over 460 bodies found - this shows the extent of the site as this was one grave out of over 120. From here you can see the ground behind dip up and down showing only a few of the excavated graves. After this the headset guide allows you to listen to some real life stories and experiences - these were incredibly sad to hear but definitely helped make what happened there more real. Following this we visited another mass grave which had the bodies of 100 decapitated men, they believe these were seen as spies or traitors to the Vietnamese (Khmer bodies, Vietnamese heads). At this point the headset guide had given us lots of bits if information including telling us about some of the propaganda slogans the Khmer Rouge used. (I can't remember them exactly but would suggest, if your interested, in searching some as they show how ruthless and evil the Khmer Rouge really were!).
We also visited two glass boxes which is where the groundskeepers keep any bone fragments or cloth they find that gets washed up by the rain. This is another chilling part of the tour is that you, every so often, step over bits of half reviled clothes or spot the odd bit of bone, again showing just how real and recent this atrocity was! Two of the most moving bits of the tour were found at two trees - the first was the killing tree and the second was the magic tree. The killing tree is located next to another grave site that contained only woman and small children's bodies, the tree was named so, as when it was found it had remnants of blood and flesh still on it - they used this tree to kill the small children by smashing the heads against its trunk. The second tree, although it didn't have anything happen in it, held the loudspeakers which played propaganda music loudly enough to cover up the screams of the people being executed. The headset guide explained that this, along with the sound if the generator was all you could hear throughout the night - the reason this was so chilling is that they played an example of the last noise people would have heard. The final part of the day was a walk around the memorial stupa (temple) which now houses 17 tiers of the skulls of the victims of this killing field. A quick walk around the small museum there are we sat down and had a drink to take it all in. We jumped back in the tuk tuk and we headed off to S-21 (Tuol Sleng genocide museum), this was a quick drive and we arrived, in the middle of the city, a slightly gloomy, normal set of buildings stood - this is S-21! We grabbed some lunch and then started the tour around the former prison - the building was once a high school which consisted of four, three storey buildings and the remnants of a swing and monkey bars. You start in Block A which consists of large, old class rooms which was used for the 'special' prisoners. The first floor contained a single metal bed and the remains of the foot shackles they used to use, these are a startling begining as the rooms, although almost empty, still felt chilling. The floors were covered in deep engrained blood stains, found under the beds and in the corners, as you moved up to the second floor the rooms were larger and previously contained between 3-5 people - still being classed as 'special' prisoners. When you take in the facts it all becomes quite a horrible place to be: Over 40,000 people came through S-21 and 20,000 died on site.
They used it as a tortue facility, forcing false confessions and testing torture methods such as bleeding people, seeing what organs someone can live without and other horrific things.
And the worst thing of all, only 7 people survived!
The second building is dedicated mainly to showing the images taken at the site - they photographed every person who entered and have displayed some of these photos - this is the most horrible but enlightening thing we've ever done, as you pass from room to room, board to board, picture to picture of the faces of the people who came through and never left. The third building 'Block C' had been left to show you the conditions of the 'ordinary' prisoner, from the outside it was completely different to the first two blocks as it was covered in aged and rusty barbed wire. As you entered the first floor they showed the quickly made cells that were brick built through a series of 4 classrooms, each room containing 12 cells, no doors, no toilet, just chains on the floor in a cell you can barley lay in. From here the second floor contained wooden cells with locked doors but still hardly enough room to lay in, the third floor contained large open rooms which had 1 - 18 written around the walls, showing this was a mass detention room, where you would be laid down side by side until the room was filled. These conditions show just what the people who came here endured, with the constant dark stained floors, horrific conditions and the image of the faces still fresh in your mind. In the introduction to the killing fields the guide said this wasn't a tourist attraction like the grand palace or a market, that it was hard hitting and not a good feeling experience and he was right - however this all makes you look at this country and the men and woman you see everyday in a whole new way. The final building was another dedicated to informing you about the things that happened during and after the genocide, about the forced confessions people had to write, what happened to the guards who worked there and the leaders who sanctioned this horrific crime! We all came away a little speechless from what we had seen and made our way back to our hotels, we said goodbye to Pat and Jen and chilled at our room for a bit before getting some food and arranging our travel bits for our trip back to Bangkok. Our evening discussion was all about what we had seen and learnt that day and we were amazed that unless you looked for it you would never know about the atrocity that happened so recently in history! I hope we have explained this experience well, as it is the best thing we have done since being away from home and we hope we have conveyed the shear shock, sadness and harrowing experience that we did today.