As Washington D.C. and the rest of the country was trying to make sense of the horrible shooting at the National Holocaust Museum, I was thousands of miles away, walking through an abandoned French school in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
It now houses the “Toul Sleng Genocide Museum.”
From 1975 to 1979, it was the center for torture and death in the capital city.
Those who survived the torture from the Khmer Rouge were then sent out to the killing fields, where they died. Many didn’t survive the torture, and more than 2,000 bodies were discovered at the “school” when the Khmer Rouge were overthrown by the Vietnamese army in 1979.
For anyone visiting Cambodia, this is a must stop. It is sobering. It is emotional.
But it is essential.
The school compound represents a number of buildings — each was used for various forms of torture. In the courtyard, a wooden pole once used by students for chin ups and pull ups was turned into a torture machine and a makeshift gallows. And yes, waterboarding was used frequently.
In each room there are still instruments of torture and death left as they were found in 1979 — iron chains, shackles, electric wires. In almost every room, a glance towards the ceiling reveals large splatters of blood — not touched for more than 30 years.
And in two of the buildings are displayed the last known photos of those who died. I remember visiting Dachau, the German concentration camp located outside of Munich.
I was struck immediately by the stacks of shoes and clothing worn by those who were ultimately killed. A similar stack of shirts and pants remains in the Cambodian genocide museum. Right next to those photos.
No one knows the exact number of people killed there, but a low estimate is more than 20,000.
“We must keep the memory of the atrocities committed on Cambodian soil alive,” said my guide, “so that we can continue to build a new, strong and compassionate country.”
I couldn’t agree more.
A word of warning: the Cambodians have kept the building much as they found it when the Khmer Rouge left.
It is a difficult visit even for those of us — myself included — who have covered wars and revolutions.
What I found most surprising is that so many in my group of volunteers from airline ambassadors — here to work with orphanages — had never seen the movie The Killing Fields.
Something tells me that Netflix is about to get more requests for that film than usual.
In a few hours, I fly to Bangkok to do my radio show, and more updates then.
By Peter Greenberg for Peter Greenberg.com.
For more from Peter, check out his Travel Detective Blog.
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