S21 and the killing fields

Great start to my new age

Shared a tuk tuk with the British girl I met last night. We went to S21 first. Aka genocide museum aka secret torture prison. Don’t take these as exact facts …. but this all happened in like 5 years. Mid 70s to 1979

This won’t be a fun post just a heads up

The DAY the cambodia civil war, which is tied to what we know as the vietnam war, ended, khmer Rouge took over and marched people out of their homes to the country to start farming. City people don’t know how to farm. They had movie theaters with elevators for Petes sake. Anyways peoole were removed from their homes to walk to the country. And if they made it they were to farm. Any disobedience and they would be tortured and killed. The objective was to start over and destroy the classes. To make everyone pure farmers. Anyone educated, religious,  or had glasses on were killed. 3 million out of the population of 8 million. The prison is gut renching and horrific. People were tortured to confess to being a spy (when they werent) or something they didn’t do. The leader had a saying that in order to kill the weed you need to kill the roots. So, to him, this meant killing the whole family so nobody would seek revenge. After they got someone to make their fake confession through torture, they sent them to be killed at a mass grave site (the killing fields). The prison quickly opened up to the public once it was over. Mug shots of people killed were displayed so families could try to find their loved ones. 

The survivors aren’t that old.

The largest of the secret torture prisons. Barbed wired in so nobody could jump from the balcony. It used to be a school with mango trees in the court yard.

Holes were blown into the walls. This was one of the buildings. They were all different 

Graffiti wall

We had a break at the Russian market. I got some fake ray bands 

Next was the killing fields. It was… kind of less shocking. But with very distinct terrible moments if that makes sense. Maybe i was already numb. There’s bone and clothing still surfacing 

I almost stepped on a bone

There’s a striped shirt just to the right of the bush. And bone in the sun in the bottom right corner. There’s a glass box of clothing that they’ve found and pulled up. There was velcro. There were lots of small reminders of how recent this was.

There was a large tree that had a specific use for babies I’m not going to talk about.

They used to blare out propaganda music 24/7 to hide the screaming. The speaker hung from a tree. For me the worst moment was when the audio tour took you to the tree and played one of the songs then added in the sound of the generator that supplied the camp.

Then at the end of the tour I literally almost fell over. They have a display in a pagoda of 16000 skulls. That’s not even everyone that was killed at the camp. There was 17 rows of skulls. Here’s 8 of them. All 17 would be impossible to get in one picture. They’re marked by how old they were and how they were killed.

Exhausted, we had some beer afterwards. Currently eating taro ice cream. Taro is a tuber. I’m basically eating potato ice cream and I’m pretty sure it could solve everyone’s problems. At least for a moment.