Beautiful Phnom Penh, the killing fields and S-21

Have you ever been to a place before where you have to change your tshirt 3 times a day.. A place so hot that your underwear becomes another layer of wet skin? Perhaps that was too much information?
The point is that this place is hotter than hell .. And hell is relevant for Phnom Penh, for in the late 1970s the Khmer Rouge turned this city and the rest of Cambodia into a slaughter house for the well educated and politically connected. In their reign of terror they decided to try and destroy all links to the Khmer heritage in the country.. The easy way to do this in their minds was to execute everyone they could in power. This meant many well educated citizens removed their glasses and headed out to farms pretending they could not read or write a word in order to save their lives. After the horror,many towns and cities had to start again with no education and no one to pass down the trades to the next generations.

This leads me onto the killing fields. I debated whether to even write about this as we both found it a very emotional visit.. And I have even deleted all photos from my camera as it just didn’t feel right retaining and exposing them. I felt like I had infected myself with the misery and macabre scenes by recording the empty souls.

The day before we had ventured into the city for a walk at about 11am. By 1pm we were overheated and back in the hotel room with Ladesha nursing sun stroke and a severe migraine. This prompted us to get up and go to the fields by 7am to avoid the sweltering sun. This also meant we were there by ourselves - not a ‘soul’ about.

The first site you see is a temple at the gates of the ground. The Khmer used the religious temples around the country as torture chambers if you can believe that. After they had exhumed the mass graves they didn’t know what to do with the massive amount of bodies they had pulled. The idea they came up with was to build a temple and place the skulls inside to be on display while being respected. They have 8000 skulls here.. And there are many thousands more still in the fields as they certainly haven’t removed all the bodies.

This is the only shot I saved on my camera. You can see they have built the temple for respect. The next shot is a close up where you can just see the skulls behind the glass.

There are signs all over the place asking you to respect the dead by being quiet.. This makes the fields a very peaceful place to wander about. Not far from the temple is a signboard that marks the spot where a wooden shed was once built. This shed was used to store the overloaded amount of people brought for killing, as at one point the executors were killing 300 people a day, and they couldn’t keep up - so something had to be built to hold prisoners until the next day.
Among the dead 9 foreigners were also killed including an Australian caught up in the politics. I am guessing his body rests here as well.

What we saw next is almost unbelievable. We entered the graves with no warning to see a space about the size of a football field covered in craters where the mass graves have been exhumed. Looking down I thought I had stood on a tree root - but no, what we are standing on between the craters are the bones of the dead! All around the place are literally thousands of teeth, little bones and even parts of the skeleton starting to be revealed from the wear and the tear of the beaten pathway. At one point we looked down to see a jaw bone with a full set of teeth intact starting to make its way from the dry dirt. Clothes are everywhere, and although it has been almost 30 years, the clothing is still in one piece and the colours vibrant.. Which is scary as you get the idea that this was not a long time ago at all.

Signs are posted about to paint the scene and engineering of the place. There was a tree called the magic tree where a loud speaker was hung playing music at top volume to drown out the tortured screams of imminent death. Another tree was for beating the children to death on. There was a mass grave (still containing the bodies) of 163 headless victims.
Death here would come in only a few different methods. Mainly people were told to kneel on the edge of a grave while the executioner would bring down either an axe, hoe, or stick to the back of the head. The lucky ones got a bullet at the very top of the skull.

To complete this journey we needed to visit S-21. S-21 is their security centre where almost all of the victims were sent to before the killing fields to be tortured so they would admit information.
S-21 is actually a school the Khmer Rouge took over. The classrooms became torture chambers for the inmates and soundproof glass was installed so the screams would be muted.

It is a very grim site indeed. All the classrooms are open to look at and there are pictures on the walls of the found decomposing prisoners that were killed before the Rouge ran out.. These pictures obviously mark the rooms where they were found also. Not knowing what to do with the 14 badly decomposed bodies, it was decided they were to be buried in the school grounds with 14 marked graves. Looking down on the school room lino - you can clearly see the dark stains on the unwashed floors of the horrors that took place. Moving to a downstairs hall.. You can see room after room of black and white photos of each prisoner that came through here. Most are beaten and broken staring straight through the lens at us in pain - their expressions are timeless and you are instantly brought to the moment of the shutter - stomach’s churning and brains racing.
On one of the last boards is a picture of the Australian mentioned earlier. He is standing to the side in a poker dotted shirt with his head turned to us - his expression is one of “I wont be here long, this is obviously a mistake”.

In the final room are 8 skulls on display - and only on display during the trial. They are all evidence towards the methods of execution and torture used here - most marking blows to the head with blunt instruments before death. These skulls are in glass casing on slatted wooden stands. They are slatted so that the souls of the bodies are still free to enter and leave at will.

A lot of Cambodians wont visit these two sites for fear of the ghosts that walk the grounds, and I for one don’t blame them.

I feel like I should brighten this post up a bit. So I'm going to include some shots from the Royal Palace we visited. The architecture is simply stunning and on a very grand scale.

This is a funny start - trying to take a shot of ourselvs with the camera on a timer in a shrub

I love the serpents in this next temple.