In Phnom Penh we went to see Tuol Sleng and the killing fields – the torture prison and one of the execution fields of the Khmer Rouge. Apparently 12,000 people went into Tuol Sleng in 4 years, men, women, children, old, young, westerners, less than a dozen of them were able to tell the story.
The secondary school-torture facility-museum tells the story of the program, including relatives stories of those taken, recounts by former guards and stories of their return to life, mugshots of those brought to Tuol Sleng, and many of the torture devices used. The silence of the place is striking, some visitors were in tears. Running the program seems so simple, but also completely at random. It didn’t matter if you were in the Khmer Rouge or not, there was no mandated target. More like the Stalin era killings than the holocaust. Not that it really matters.
The Killing Fields, now just a grassy field with depressions labelled “Mass Grave: 706 people”, though they don’t look big enough to hold the numbers on signs, I guess it all depends on the depth. On sign points to a tree saying “Tree used to kill children”, and my mind remembered a painting at Tuol Sleng of soldiers swinging an infant against a tree.
In amongst the pictures of those executed is one of an Australian victim, he looks about 30, curly brown hair, strong jaw, a confident interrogative look in his eye and a big, polka dotted collar. I can only assume he was a foreign correspondent, he has that look. It’s that picture I connected most with, and can only imagine he thought he’d get out of it alive, without being tortured because he was a westerner, a journalist, an observer, but he didn’t.
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