The other side of the Killing Fields

I’ve chosen to publish this from the raw format I wrote in that day: Here it is. Today I went to the S21 Torture Concentration Camp and the Killing Fields in Cambodia.

I’ve had one of those days whereby people have warned me, tales have told me and the world all knows, but somehow, when you are there, personally there, no-one can prepare you for what you will experience in that moment.

Our day started at the Tabitha Foundation, talking though the whole house building process. It was comical to start of with, telling us stories of how Tabitha are now responsible building the house foundations because teams before us we’re not so crash hot at the laying the foundation of the houses as a result, there were some casualties. So we were just here to hammer the floors and walls. Hammer, hammer, hammer - warned to watch for our thumbs, because it was bloody painful to get hit, time after time. We all laughed and joked and then there was silence for we were about to be told the truth of why we were here.

Nari, our host, told us of her story. She apologised for her broken English and she asked for us to bare with her and hoped that we would understand what she was trying to convey. There was no need to do so, we would all know in our heads, hearts and minds that what she was sharing was an honest reality of years of anguish, not quite reconciled.  By the time we had heard what she had to say, even those that had been there before, would be hit by a wave of sorrow and sadness, empathic to her cause.

The Khmer Rouge had told her entire family, and in fact the entire town that they needed to flee from Phnom Pehn for three days to be protected from a threat of war. They gathered with them a small amount of clothes and money to see them through a short stint away from home. Three days turned into three and half years, she told us.  She was stoic until this point. Then the glisten of tears formed in her eyes.

She told us she was separated from her family and forced to live with girls her own age. She was just 14, so young, so little, so innocent.  I knew girls her age, and what it was like myself.  No-one was allowed to show or express any kind of emotion or fear with the each other. They were forbidden to feel she explained. Their clothes were removed and they were forced to wear black.  Numb, isolated in confined communities frozen by horror of what may happen to them if they did not obey.

Her chin started to quiver and her eyes well. To me, it sounded surreal.  I couldn’t relate to what she was saying at first; incredible the strength and power of denial; I simply didn’t want to. Watching her and listening to even the sound of her voice, so raw and emotional, even some 32 years on, was too greater force for even my defiance to last.  My nose went first, then my eyes over flowed, a tear dropped to my chin; quivering, my chest felt rock hard as my mouth and lips swallowed my deepest breath. I was now completely connected to what she was saying.

She told us that she and the other teenagers worked form 4am and worked until 9pm, all day in the fields with hardly any water or food to eat. And that they all feared the night the most. She said again, they hated the night. She paused. And my chest sunk. Tears were streaming down my face. I knew what she was going to tell us was not going to be the entire truth. I could see sorrow and shame on her face. She didn’t need to tell us all, but a story was given about people never returning after the night visits, and that was enough.

She paused and cried. I could tell on her face she wasn’t telling us the whole truth. There was so much more to her story. Our camera’s stopped at this point and the room was still. Completely still, we were with her, even those that had been before.

I didn’t want to go to the Killing Fields. I had hoped to visit an orphanage instead; I wanted to deny this experience. However, I chose to follow the group and get on the bus to go there. The group satisfied my need for distraction with great chatter and talk.

Arriving at S-21, Dougie,our leader, explained that lunch was at the restaurant opposite at 12pm, at this point it was 10am. He told us, if anyone needed to retreat before lunch, they could. In my mind I heard if you don’t like this - get out.

I had said to a few of the group that I wouldn’t cope too well with this, and each agreed, there was no protecting any of us from what we were about to feel walking into that place.

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the former Security Office 21 in “Democratic Kampuchea” was created by the orders of Pol Pot. IN April 17, 1975. Office 21 was called S-21 and designed for the detention and interrogation, inhuman torture, and killing after confession from the detainees were received and documented. From the moment I walked in, I felt it, a tight ball of hard torn hot energy in my chest. I felt sick. Immediately. I’d taken literally ten steps inside the compound.

We stopped at the signpost that framed the circumstances. Pol Pot had tricked the people into highlighting that were doctors, lawyers, teachers or what he had called Intellects and they were all captured and brought to S-21 to be tortured to understand remove them from society. These people were tortured for names of others, or merely because they had been educated or considered a threat to the communist regime.

Nari had cried earlier saying that what these people had gone through was nothing like the days of Hitler, because he didn’t kill his own people. Pol Pot had no regard for his own countrymen. It was all about killing off the strong to have control.

I walked around the grounds solo. I wept constantly. I walked past trees where prisoners, innocent teachers and doctors had been tied and tortured to an inch of their life. The marking on the tress were as if some one had taken an axe to the raw wood, but we knew, I knew, that there had been flesh before the wood was hacked out.

I broke away from the others and took myself to the rooms where there photographs of all the prisoners. I was hung of energy, overwhelmed by the sense that I was actually in the room filled with photos of every single victim killed. Hundreds of them, black and white faces in front me was paralysing my body, yet my face felt tears. There was so much sadness and sorrow in this room, and it wasn’t just mine, it was with every single person alive, walking through that room, not wanting to make eye contact with a living being, lifiting their glaze on to the eyes of the photos.

I wanted to walk out, it was overwhelming, but then I noticed a look on one mans face in a photo. It stoped me. I caught my tears in my throat and walked towards him to look closer. I was intrigued, there was a look of something more than a victim, it was almost a smerk. There was anger in his eyes and defiance in his expression. I sighed, a real “fuck you” expression, actually.

I’m fascinated by micro expressions and what our face really tells what we are feeling. I was compelled to look and wanted to see more “life” in these photos. In fact, most of the men had these looks; it was a look of “you might torture me, you might do inhuman acts to me, but you wont break me”. There was real courage in some of these men’s expressions. My breath drew so much deeper and stronger by seeing this.

Then I looked at the women. You could tell the ones that had been raped and molested. There was a look of shame in most of their eyes, some mixed with anger, so mixed with sadness. There certainly were no real blank expressions, masks maybe, but if you really looked, you could see. Essentially, there was a story on each of their faces, I didn’t need to read about the electrocutions, hangings, tree beatings, and rape or fingernail removals to know they’d been through a living nightmare.

We lunched and moved on to the Killing Fields. Again, I didn’t want to connect with what my head knew would be a horrible experience. Six of us hired a guide. Sitting under a tree beside the shrine of the 9000 skulls that were recovered, we were told that Khmer Rouge were instructed not to waste bullets, rather, these men, woman and children where killed using axes, pickets, rakes and and tree trunks before being kicked into a dug out grave.

The first grave we saw had 486 bodies in it. It was the size of a billiard table. I started to convulse with nausea. I had just read in a book that it was teenagers and boys that were the killers, these kids were brain washed, or forced to do these murders and the vision of these hinaus acts were making me sick to the stomach.

We walked further round the pathways of the fields. There were floods in the near by damn, so to our horror, the bodies were starting to come out of the ground. Clothes, bones and teeth were randomly poking out of the dirt track. They had only recovered 9800 of the 20,000 bodies that were believed to be slaughtered there.

We then came to path where the burial site laid for woman and children. Beside which, stood a mamouth tree, a oak with a wide glorious trunk. I had read about this in the bus on the way there, the young vigilantes would smash the babies heads against the tree trunk and then throw them in the pit. Pol Pot believed that he had to kill the root of the tree, and that meant, to kill the family of the intellects so that no survivors could seek revenge. At the moment, I really could visualise it. Oh. Smash. I didn't want to feel at this point. I didn't want an imagination. Floods of salty water dripped into my mouth again, streaming, my shoulder sunk and my body wanting to turn but so heavy. I wanted to see anything but this.

I turned and there was the “Hanging tree”. This tree was where men that were noisy as there were being killed were hung to silence them.  This is not what I wanted to turn to see. My mind rife with imagination- I saw spindly bodies hanging from these magnificent out reaching branches, all blowing in the wind, hanging there. Silent.

At that point, I utterly lost it. I didn’t want to connect with this any more, I wanted denial so much and  wanted to be back in that place before I got on the bus, happy with no experience. I was so scared to run because I was afraid that I would tread on burial grounds and for a moment I felt completely trapped.

I am not religious but I said a pray and I asked for forgiveness - so I ran. Back trough the path beyond the hanging tree, out to a wooden seat next to the soda stand. All I could do was curl my body in a babe shape and hug my knees. I was a mess with wetness from tears and streaming snot - I had no tissues left, and all I had to use was my shorts. I felt sick.

These innocent people were killed because they were educated. As I felt sick for the dead, I also felt such remorse for those who had been force to kill, because even if they were not formally brought to justice, they had their own life long penalty of mental anguish and nightmares of what they had done to their fellow countrymen. That in itself would be utter torture to a man corrupted by a force stronger than he.

The whole way back in the bus everyone was silent. No chatter, just very pensive, introspective people, all very shaken, moved by what they’d just seen.

The other side of what I experienced is this – apart from the bloodshed and physical torture, what kept creeping into my mind was this - that in our lives, in our work places and families, this kind of behaviour is prevalent in our every day worlds and we just come to accept it.

Meaning, that we are conditioned to either conform to a culture, a way of life because we are told, “that is just the way it is”. The ever prominent “just because theory” that I talk about often. It is what is because that’s just the way we do things, and common folk fear to have the presence, or the confidence to question, because of the trepidation of exile.

We’re conditioned to it. Society wants us all to be the same. Insurance policies want us all to be married, banks wants us to have a mortgage, families want us married no matter what, companies want us all to fit in to the “culture” and do what we’re told. The government wants us to all conform to regulation for order. And so on….

In so many ways we have people controlling us every day of our lives. It’s so rare that people stand up and say, “you know what, how does a big fat no sound, I’m going to do this……!" And you know what, when one says it, I can assure you, there are a majority of people in that group that all think it, but wont come forward. Condition is what we know.  What we know is what we are comfortable with. No matter how awful it might seem. It’s too scary to change. Do you know what I’m saying??

 Is the responsibility of being a member of society really democratic?

I got incredibly upset that no greater force such as the United Nations did anything to stop this atrocity. But then I came to realise that forces are greater than what any of us realise. Politics, socialisms, communism, culture, peer pressure, fear, desire, belief, religion. Family. Love.


What about the individual? Nari was the only survivor of her family. She was alone, striving to create a world that was better for her people. She is a survivor.

I always want to say something inspirational at the end of all of my blogs, but for now I'm focused and really care about telling the story.

But here goes; bless the survivors of the world - no matter what you have had to endure, somehow you're not alone.


TBS xx