Fairytale, take three and a Return to Reality

The other big visit we made in Phnom Penh, before leaving for Angkor Wat, was the S-21 killing field, Choung Ek. This is what I had to say immediately after the experience:

At the entrance I am greeted with skulls in a twisted form of remembrance, pushing against traditional beliefs in order to make an overt statement. I want to pay respects and do my part to honor the dead, but can't bring myself to do so at this place designed for me, irrespective of the victims needs, beliefs, desires. Instead, my muted cries of agony and apology subconsciously are hurled out to the five directions.

On the right, the site is mapped; graves are marked by boxes, some of the worst given a number and description of who had been hatefully tossed inside. On the final panel the broken English declares that this holocaust was worse than The Holocaust. I wonder at how one can even claim to calculate the value of suffering. What categories are measured - body counts, how they died, what they endured beforehand? Is it better to know why you are being killed, or does ignorance make death more bearable?

Turn left and exhumed graves begin to appear. At first they are merely pits filled with rancid rain water. Then the scraps of clothing become more numerous and capture my eye. Remnants of a life destroyed before their time, left out to fray, thin, and someday rot. I am told the rain has hidden further gruesome memories of life unlived, masking fragments of bone in mud. I can't say I mind.

As butterfly couples float around my shoulders, the garment scraps give way to human scraps. My toe hits an ulna, my heel just misses canines and molars. Horrified, I wonder why they remain unceremoniously packed into the path rather than properly cared for - buried, cremated or even preserved, entombed in plexiglass.

Turn left again and the reverse of skulls is what I now see, signaling my tour is complete. Again I mourn their caging and can only wonder at what I have seen.


I don't really have more to say than that...


When we weren't visiting these sites, we were teaching english at a music school. The kids were so much fun to teach and be with. They taught me how to count and say hello and good bye in Khmer. I have never seen anyone smile as much as they did either. Always smiling.