Choeng Ek Killing fields and S21 prison

*this could be triggering* – It’s about the Khmer rouge, torture, murder and genocide - I am so sorry if these things have touched your life.

We visited Cheong Ek Killing fields near Phnom Penh, and S21 the torture prison in Phnom Penh. It was an intense experience, and I’m not sure I can really articulate or understand the experience, but I will try to share how I felt.

The Killing fields when we got there were felt peaceful, there were tree’s and grass and butterflies flying around, It was fairly quiet. We got the headsets that tell you about the different parts of the site and walked around the area listening to the audioguide.

It’s so hard for me to imagine in anyway what happened there, especially to relate a site that felt so peaceful to such cruelty and suffering.

 I can’t relate to the experience in any way and I think I am a very experiential person or learner. To imagine what happened I feel like I use a part of my brain that imagines the imagery of a story I read.

Having been lucky enough to never really have had my life or the life of my family, friends, loved one’s threatened, I just cannot understand how horrific it must have felt, and still be for the people who suffered under the Khmer rouge, My sister realised while we were there that the regime occurred within her lifetime, so all of the people her age and older had lived through it. It is so recent still, It almost amazes me to see so many people living their lives in what looks like normality and to know that there must still be such trauma and pain present.

I like to believe that people are good, to give them the benefit of the doubt, despite knowing in my head that people commit awful atrocities against each other, I just can’t reconcile this with the truth that these sort of things happen everywhere and often, and often go unreported/noticed/mourned. I know I am lucky to be so naïve, to never have been faced with what a person can do to another.

How  can humanity encase such beauty, wonder, generosity and love and also such violence hatred, and brutality? And I suspect it’s not even always clear cut the differences, I don’t like to think of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people, I think I have elements of both as do most people I suspect.  Are the people who worked in the Khmer rouge messed up, ill, evil, or were they terrified of what would happen to them if they didn’t obey? In which case who masterminded it? Are there single people to blame like Pol Pot, or Hitler who somehow made millions of people kill, and terrorise millions of others?

 Part of me doesn’t want to understand that brutality in a real sense.

We also visited the torture prison S21.

I don’t think I want to write about it. It was awful, people being absolutely destroyed in every sense of the word. It just makes me question how I see us human beings, I don’t know if I can fit these things into my worldview and still be hopeful and believe in myself and other people.

But does that disrespect the memory and experience of the millions of people throughout the world who have been faced with this sort of violence and terror firsthand?

I have no answers, this is my attempt to share how It felt.