it was time to get serious and to learn more about the history and past of the country.
cambodia is know for its"killing fields" and there is even a movie about it.
by 9am we were in the tuk-tuk on our way to the outskirts of phnom penh.
choeung ek(killing fields) became a place of mass murder where prisoners from toul stleng were brought for executon.The Khmer Rouge government arrested, tortured and eventually executed anyone(men,women,children,babies) suspected of belonging to several categories of supposed "enemies":

anyone with connections to the former government or with foreign governments
professionals and intellectuals - in practice this included almost everyone with an education, or even people wearing glasses (which, according to the regime, meant that they were literate)
ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese, ethnic Thai and other minorities in Eastern Highland, Cambodian Christians, Muslims and the Buddhist monks
"economic sabotage" for which many of the former urban dwellers (who had not starved to death in the first place) were deemed to be guilty by virtue of their lack of agricultural ability.
Some 17,000 people were taken to sites (also known as The Killing Fields), outside Phnom Penh such as Choeung Ek where most were executed (mainly by pickaxes,bludgeoned or stabbed to death to save bullets) and buried in mass graves.

The exact number of people who died as a result of the Khmer Rouge's policies is debated, as is the cause of death among those who died. Access to the country during Khmer Rouge rule and during Vietnamese rule was very limited. In the early 1980s, the Vietnamese-installed regime that succeeded the Khmer Rouge conducted a national household survey, which concluded that over 4.8 million had died, but most modern historians do not consider that number to be reliable.

Modern research has located thousands of mass graves from the Khmer Rouge era all over Cambodia, containing an estimated 1.39 million bodies. Various studies have estimated the death toll at between 740,000 and 3,000,000, most commonly between 1.4 million and 2.2 million, with perhaps half of those deaths being due to executions, and the rest from starvation and disease.[9]

what to say????what we read shocked us but what we saw let us down.im german and the german history is full of mass murder.i have seen concentration camps which made my heartbeat stop.when i walked into one of the german concentration camps i could feel the terror,pain,sadness... of the place.
maybe i expected the killing fields as shocking but i dont really know.for me it was too nice.the place is very small.nothing there exept for the nice glass pagoda with the famous skulls pilled up.the skulls made me shiver but otherwise it felt like taking a walk in a beautiful garden on a nice sunny day.it didnt touch me as much as i thought it would be.maybe it was the beauty of the place which made it hard to believe that people were killed and dumped in mass graves over here.

but what us in the toul sleng genocide museum expected was a totally different story.
this former school was used as a prison by the khmer rouge and known as S-21.

seeing the classrooms with the chalkboards on the walls and the beds where prisoners were tortured made it a very sad place.(you still could see the blood stains on the ceiling)seeing pictures of people who got killed there and the tiny cells which were built into the school made my heart so heavy and i felt very uncomfortable.its hard to believe that human beings can be so cruel killing without any scuples,making women,men,children and even babies suffer.how can an human being be fooled by a political or religious idea?how can they be so brainwashed?how can they torture somebody else without any doubts and emotions?

in cambodia this all happened in the years between 1973 - 1978.

i was born in 1977 in east germany.seeing all this made me wonder how much my mum in east germany knew.did the world knew about the happenings in camboida?

why did nobody help the citizens of cambodia?east germany was a communist country as well and while i kept looking at the pictures of tortured and killed cambodians i started to think-what had they shown to us - the east germans and even the rest of the world?im sure they showed a happy and perfect communist country-but how could they hide all their cruelty?nobody suspected anything?but than you can ask all those questions about the 3.reich.

the leaders of the khmer rouge were influenced by france and its political happenings and views at the time.

i always think that the western influence in any way if then or now spoiles thoses countries.i dont like the westernization of such unspoiled and so different places in terms of culture,religion and life style.

it makes me angry and i just cant understand why people can get so fanatic about a political(in this case) or religious view

my head was full of thoughts and the feeling in my heart was heavy.

the school is a sad place to see but one should see it and keep the history in mind so that we wont let it happen again-in any part of the world.

it was an emotional day - me and jen were just quiet and let everything settle into your head.we couldnt even really talk about it.

if you want to read more facts about it look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuol_Sleng

heavy day and much to take in.we needed to switch our minds of and decided to visit a little island in the mekong-lovely