April 7
Today we wake up far too early due to the unexpected arrival
at 5:30am of a cement truck next door that is pounding and heaving right
outside our window. I am able to lie
awake in bed for all of one hour before getting up and searching out a cup of
coffee. I find the most amazing place
just down the street…Phnom Penh’s vesion of Starbucks called Café Fresco. They even have Wifi. Enjoy my latte for a while before returning
to the now quiet hotel and wake up the crew.
We are going to Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide (or S-21) and the Killing
Fields today. First, we decide to go
ahead and get our bus tickets for an early morning departure tomorrow for Ho Chi
Minh City (HCMC) or Saigon. We get a
rude awakening when we learn that visas cannot be obtained at the border as we
had assumed. This is a total amateur
mistake and we know it. It is now 10:30
on a Saturday morning and they are telling us that the Embassy will not reopen
until Monday. Great! We have flights out of HCMC on the early
morning of the 11th and this is totaling going to screw us up if we
cannot get there in time. We speak with
the hotel staff, who have been quite helpful, and they tell us they can obtain
them for us for an expedited fee. We don’t
have an option except to pay, so we pay.
They also help us with a cab driver/guide to take us to our
destinations. We tidy up the last
details and are off to the Genocide Museum.
We start up a conversation with our driver and much to our dismay, we
learn that his father was in the Khmer Rouge and he has lovely things to say
about Pol Pot…..wow, didn’t realize anyone existed that could defend such a
monster who slaughtered nearly 25% of his own population, but looks like we
found one and are captives in his car for the remainder of the day. The Museum houses the former school that was
taken over in 1975 and turned into a torture chamber and prison where as many
as 12, 000 plus people were brutalized, tortured and killed or were then taken
to Choeng Ek to be killed on the spot.
They do not seem to have invested the resources that one might expect to
present this place in a comprehensive way, but the photos of each of the
prisoners speak for themselves. The
Khmer Rouge were apparently very methodical about documenting each of their
victims by photographing them and keeping records of their “confessions” of
being spies or agents of the CIA or KGB.
The photos of the actual tortured bodies that were found here upon the
liberation of Cambodia in 1979 are the most shocking of all and I cannot help
but to start crying. This is quite
disturbing. After we complete our tour,
we return to our driver, however, this time we are completely quiet and I think the driver may have gotten
a clue as to the fact that we were not fond of the Khmer rhetoric. We then continue on to the orchard outside of
town that was turned into one of approx. 300 killing fields throughout the
country. We receive a head set that
offers very moving and complete details of what took place here with the most
horrible detail being the tree against which the bodies of woman and children
were thrown to kill them. The mothers
were forced to watch as their children were brutalized and their skulls crushed
as they were torn apart by the tree bark and then shoved into a deep mass
grave. If they were not dead from the
beating, they were then covered with DDT to chemically finish them off and to
cover the stench of the rotting bodies.
We spend quite a while here and in the museum before returning to our
hotel to get showered and rest up for a while.
We then go off to a night market and shop around for a while before
returning home and calling it a very emotional day.
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