Cambodian Killing Fields

Traveling to get to Asia takes an incredibly long time. We were en route for 28 hours. The longest stretch was the 17 hour flight from San Francisco to Singapore. Melissa keeps recording little videos of us having fallen asleep.

We went to the museum about the Cambodian genocide and had a tour guide tell us about the place: it was formally a high school that had been transformed into a prison where they would torture the prisoners with the intent to get a confession from them that they were working for the KGB or CIA so they could justify killing them. 

Who was targeted? Intellectuals. The Khmer Rouge would ask your occupation. Or decide by looking at you: If you wore glasses. Or carried a pen in your shirt pocket. Or carried a book or newspaper under your arm. All grounds to be arrested. 

If you didn’t die during the torture, and you confessed (which so many did to end the torture) you would be sentenced to die. But they didn’t tell the prisoners that’s what would happen. They were taken in the middle of the night, blindfolded, to the killing fields. There they would kneel at the side of a pit and have their throat slit. (Not shot. Bullets we’re too expensive.) Also. Their whole family would be killed as well. Why? So there wouldn’t be anyone left to seek revenge. 

Simply horrifying. How could this happen? And in my lifetime?? It boggles and distresses my mind. And heart. 1977-1979. They estimate 3 million Cambodians were killed.

There were seven survivors from this prison. Two are still living. We met them both there at the museum. One was a mechanic. They let him live because he kept the typewriter repaired. And records were so important to the Pol Pot (the crazy man who did all this).

 The other man: an artist. He painted the picture of the Pol Pot.

They let us take our picture with them. Which felt… oh I don’t know. Like we were turning them into an attraction. But they were the ones who invited us to. And I couldn’t help but put my hand on each of their shoulders trying to communicate “I care. I’m sorry this happened. I’m sorry this happened to you.” 💔 

We visited the killing field. Well, one of them anyway. There were many. 

There are as a large tree that was covered in bracelets people had left as a memorial. It was called the killing tree. 

Guards would unblindfold a mother and have her watch as they would take her baby and swing it against the tree to kill it. Then kill the mother and dump their bodies in the pit. It was so sombering. Farrell took a bracelet off his wrist. Melissa had some little beaded bracelets she had made and she offeredfor me to have one and she took one and we attached the three to the tree. 

So many questions about how all this could even happen.

This building houses many of the skulls of the 20K people who died here.

We did some research on genocide. We’re all pretty aware of the holocaust in WWII.  This isn’t the only one that’s happened in my lifetime. And one of the biggest genocides? The indigenous people here in the Americas. 

Did you know that? 😞😞

Wikipedia:Indigenous people both north and south were displaced, died of disease, and were killed by Europeans through slavery, rape, and war. In 1491, about 145 million people lived in the western hemisphere. By 1691, the population of indigenous Americans had declined by 90–95 percent, or by around 130 million people.