The killing fields and Tuol Sleng

A few weeks ago, we visited the killing fields at Choeung Ek, and Tuol Sleng, the infamous Khmer Rouge prison that is now a memorial museum.

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Mr. Chek and Mr. Dar, who bring us to and from the hospital every day, bring us to Choeung Ek first. It is about 15 km from Phnom Penh, in nearby Kandal province, and is just one example of the mass graves scattered across this country. 17,000 people were massacred at Choeung Ek. It is now a memorial site.

Right in front of the entrance is the chedi erected in memory of those who were murdered here. Behind panes of glass, high high up, skulls are arranged on shelves, organized by gender and age. At the very bottom is a pile of grey clothes, a pair of tattered sandals lying in front.

Mr. Chek tells us that three million people died under the Khmer Rouge.

He explains that Pol Pot picked Choeung Ek because it used to be a Chinese graveyard; people were afraid of the gods/ghosts that were supposed to be there. Now the mass graves are marked by pits in the ground. They are green, covered in leafy plants and lavender morning glories. A beaten dirt path winds among them. Here and there are piles of bones and clothes.

At the back of the chedi is a tall tree with a thick trunk. The Khmer Rouge hung a radio there to drown out the screams of the people they murdered. In the distance, you can hear monks chanting. A rooster crows. Birds chirp in the trees. Some girls in ragged dusty clothes on the other side of the barbed wire fence at the entrance ask you to take their photo so that they can see it; if you do, they will ask you for money too.

Mr. Chek translates for us the signs at the mass graves. There are a few times when I think he has tears in his eyes; one of these is when we stand in front of the grave where the bodies of dozens of women and children were found, naked.

I ask Mr. Chek, "Does it make you feel sad when you visit here?" and he replies with just, "Yes." On weekdays when he drives us to and from the hospital, his grin splits his round face, and he chuckles as he points out weird and wonderful things on the way. Today, in the silences as we walk from grave to grave, his face is drawn.

Mr. Chek tells us, "Three years, eight months, twenty days": the length of the Khmer Rouge reign, something that all Cambodians learn. A school group sits in the shade at the edge of the field, and their teacher tells them about life under the Khmer Rouge. They laugh when he tells them that men and women had to live separately.

Mr. Chek says he was thirteen when Pol Pot came. He remembers having to take a cow out to the countryside and working in the fields. His father would try to sneak food (fish wrapped in three banana leaves, cooked over a fire), and they would be kicked for their trouble. You couldn't talk to other people because you didn't know who would betray you. Mr. Dar doesn't remember much, as he is
four years younger, but Mr. Chek remembers everything. His son (twelve years
old) doesn't believe his father when he tells him how hard it was.

As we are leaving, Mr. Chek asks that we take a photo with him, so we pose stiffly in front of the chedi.

Outside the gate again, a man with his left leg amputated at the knee comes to us, begging. We say no, sorry, but I think of the patient at the hospital the previous day who had his left leg amputated below the knee.

Mr. Chek and Mr. Dar bring us to Tuol Sleng, then leave us: they will go home for lunch and we are to call them when we are ready to leave. I don't know if they are leaving because they would like to go home to their families for a few hours, or if it is because they don't want to walk through Tuol Sleng one more time.

Across the street, we have lunch at Boddhi Tree Café, and eat in the middle of a beautiful garden. A waiter climbs the tree next to us and returns to the ground with a handful of thick, shiny green leaves. Boddhi Tree is separated from the street by a high wall, so we can't see Tuol Sleng as we eat. Outside this wall, there are more beggars: a man with his left forearm amputated, another with what appear to be acid burns over his head and neck.

Before 1975, Tuol Sleng ("Hill of the Poisonous Trees") was a school. When the Khmer Rouge came to Phnom Penh, it became a jail: S-21, where 20,000 people would be tortured. Many of these people died here, and many more (17,000) were sent to Choeung Ek to die.

The interrogation rooms are in the first building, where the bodies of the last 14 prisoners to be tortured here were found by the advancing Vietnamese army in 1979. In each room, an iron bedstead. Some rooms also have shackles; one, empty ammunition boxes made of heavy metal with English words on the outside; another, the business end of a rusted hoe. In some of the rooms, there is blood spatter on the more than ten-foot high ceilings.

Outside, the courtyard. Not so long ago, schoolchildren played and shouted and laughed here. Trees with fragrant white blossoms rim the small graveyard where the last 14 prisoners were buried. One tree stands beside the outer wall, just outside of which is a double corrugated metal fence topped with barbed wire. In front of the second building, some parallel bars, meant for children to swing from. The tallest one was turned into a gallows of sorts, from which suspended prisoners would be dunked into a vat of water.

In the second building, they are showing room after room of display boards with black-and-white photos, five rows of thirteen on each board. Each photo is a headshot of a Tuol Sleng prisoner: men and women (old and young), children, babies. There are two boards with photos of boys, all wearing caps, some with smiles on their faces. These are Khmer Rouge soldiers who did not know that later they would be imprisoned and tortured by their own. There is one board with photos of small children and babies, their round faces uncomprehending. These rooms bring tears to your eyes. You wipe them away, but there are more.

In the next building, the cells where prisoners were held--on one floor, made of wood; on another, made of brick. Each cell is barely big enough for one adult to lie down in. All the way down you walk through the rooms, cells on either side of you. The air is stifling. On the balcony outside, the barbed wire that was strung to foil suicide attempts still hangs there.

In the last building, photo exhibits, some with stories of the people in the photos. You look at the dates and the ages of the survivors, and it strikes you that they are not so old--everywhere in this country, there are people who are the living memory of what happened, who can still recall in their minds the fuzzy outlines of the faces of those they loved, those who suffered and died.

On the top floor, they show a documentary about a young Khmer woman and the Khmer Rouge cadre who loved her--and whom she in turn loved. Their tender letters to each other survived, but they did not. Her face is in one of the photos here at Tuol Sleng. Her mother-in-law, old now and frail, weeps as she tells their story to the camera, to us.

Today has forced me to come to terms with the fact that so many of the doctors at the hospital, Mr. Yinna the chief OR nurse: they lived through all this. Knowing them now, the way they laugh and treat patients, and joke around with each other in the operating room, and compete for the highest score in their computer games--I can't imagine what it was like for them. This is where our sympathy is impossible, and empathy is well-meaning but hopelessly inadequate.

This is a country where at least one-quarter of the people died within the span of half a dozen years, where landmines are the legacy of a war that continues to cause suffering, where ordinary people were called upon to endure what no one should ever have to endure.

I am writing this on our terrace. It is late afternoon. The street below our building is full of people lounging around, eating, watching the traffic go by. Everyone here is cheerful and friendly, even when they have to put up with incomprehensible and thick-headed foreigners. Even the moto and tuk-tuk drivers will smile after you refuse their services.

Across the street, there is a grassy square, with a circle of little children sitting in the sand that runs around it. They are almost certainly up to some kind of mischief. Around the edges, young men and women sit with their friends. In the paved centre, older boys play football, with a small crowd watching. Soon, the sun will go down and everyone will disperse: home to their families, or maybe to a food stall to grab a snack with friends. But tomorrow, they will be there again.