S-21 Prison - Cambodia blog entry #7

After our visit to Choeung Ek Killing Fields, we went to S-21 prison museum, also called Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

I have no words. I feel I should just leave a long empty page here. No pictures, no words. Because there is nothing I can share which will convey the somber, horror of this former school.

I can share the faces of those imprisoned, tortured, dehumanized, and ultimately killed there. You can look into their eyes and feel the breath catch in your throat. You can swallow hard and divert your head. Try to erase those haunting faces from your vision. But you can’t.

Their lives deserve to be remembered. But as it is, I could only look at one wall of them. I had to skip a lot of the rooms altogether, as well as the audio clips the museum supplied.

Instead, I sat in the previous school yard and imagined the laughing voices of the children who attended it prior to April 1975. Carefree, happy kids thinking their whole lives were ahead of them.

Instead, politics snuffed out all of their dreams. The Khmer Rouge, or mostly the child soldiers they indoctrinated, committed unspeakable atrocities, while the world was led to believe it was still the Civil War that the country had been struggling through and of course there was still Vietnam.

So much was involved. So much crap.

We’ve been hearing for our entire lives about the unrest in the Middle East, and they are at it again. But all over the world, millions of innocent men, women, and children have suffered and ultimately died for reasons no rational person can grasp.

Thank you for bearing with me. Next post, on Friday, I promise to present more pleasant places we visited in Cambodia.