SAN DIEGO — Nothing in my life’s experiences prepared me for the Genocide “Museum” in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. A former high school, it had been converted into Prison S-21, by the Khmer Rouge, the craziest, most ignorant, cruelest organization on earth that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1978.
Arriving in the capital city at noon, our small group had lunch at an empty restaurant on the main boulevard. What was different was the absence of the usual choking traffic jams usually found in Asian cities. When the Khmer ruled, they drove out the residents and businesses from the city, until it became a ghost town. They forced the people into the countryside, to become slaves to the State. The former city residents were compelled to perform unfamiliar farm work and back breaking manual labor tasks. Phnom Penh had not yet fully recovered from that traumatic episode.
After lunch, we headed for the museum, a short drive from the restaurant. In two blocks, the paved streets disappeared into a schlossy goo from the rain shower earlier in the day. The bus bounced and slid a few blocks, and stopped at the entrance of a tall, white stucco walled compound, festooned with garlands of barbed wire twisting along the top. Descending from the bus, we were confronted by three young desperate men begging with pleading expressions on their faces. Two of them, had only one leg each, and they danced around, supported by a single wooden crutch. Each man had a crutch tucked under an armpit, that was firmly grasped by his hand at the mid point crossing bar. Their other free, olive skinned hands, were stretched straight out, palm up, slightly cupped, anxiously ready to snatch any coins or bills placed in it, The third fellow seemed to have both legs intact. Initially I didn’t give him any money as I had the two other two. I thought he was just a hustler taking advantage of the other’s plight. On closer look, he had maneuvered one leg to a more favorable position, and there was a prosthesis he wore to support the stump of the other leg blown off by a hidden land mine. His two comrades probably had shared the same agonizing experience. Immediately I placed money into his eager hand. A day later we came upon a group of six men sitting on the ground, each had either one or two legs blown off, or they were blind. They were playing classical Cambodian tunes on simple musical instruments. A uniformed police officer stood nearby with his bicycle. Was he there to protect them or take a cut of the money tourists dropped in their box? Sadly, I think it was to take his share. He tried to sell me a metal police badge for five dollars, which I declined. My heart cried out for the indignity these men suffer, begging others for their survival. There is an uncertain future for even healthy men in this desperately poor country devastated by their crazed countrymen. Who knows what lies in store for these poor maimed wretches and countless others like them?
We passed through the heavy iron entrance gates of the compound into a sparse grass-and-dirt courtyard. Two large three-story white stucco buildings stood at right angles to each other where the prisoners were housed. In front of the first building were fourteen white mildewed stone coffins, above ground because of the high water table. These contained the remains of the last tortured prisoners found dead on the iron springs of bed frames when the prison was liberated. Those iron beds, I noticed, had a welded decorative sun design at one end, the only sign of man’s elevation above savagery in this den of decadence. The ground floor was reserved for important prisoners, one bed in each room. A blown-up, grainy, black and white photo in each room was mounted above the bed as a testament to its wretched victim. Each body lay bloodied and broken. Screams of agony were frozen on their faces,-those who had recognizable faces.
Lieng, our fortyish Cambodian woman guide, told us prisoners were brought to these rooms for four months of torture before they were killed. They were defiled day and night without rest. The jailers extracted the names and locations of all their relatives and friends from them. Those people were also arrested and brought to the prison. The first people to be killed once wore glasses. The Khmer Army leaders were ignorant peasants and reasoned that anyone who wore glasses was an intellectual and hence were the enemy. People threw away their glasses and stumbled around when they became aware of this irrational thinking. A similar fate followed for any professional person, doctor, teacher, businessman, bureaucrat, etcetera. The legacy of this stupidity is, that Cambodia desperately needs to rebuild its intellectual capital to fully function as an independent nation. Today it is totally dependent on the aid of other nations to support basic services and repair war damaged structures.
Walking from room to room, evidence of the horror that occurred in each chamber shocked my sense of civility. Each prisoner had a rectangular metal ammunition box to use for urinating and defecating. They had to ask permission to use it. If not granted, and they had to relieve themselves, they were severely beaten. As in all tropical countries, the ceilings were extremely high to alleviate the heat. “Look up,” Liang cried out in one room and pointed to the ceiling. “There is the blood from the disemboweling of the prisoner.” This was a common method of finishing off a person, with a long wooden stick or metal rod. She pointed out bare electrical outlets without cover plates on the walls where the electrical cord was inserted to shock the testicles and rectums of the prisoners.
On the adjacent three-story balconied building, barbed wire ran the length of the structure from rooftop to the ground. The wire was placed there after a woman prisoner committed suicide, by jumping off the third floor balcony. This bothered the Khmer. They didn’t want prisoners to escape torture before they were killed. The common inmates were held on the upper floors. Crude six-foot tall brick partitions separated each cell. There were no doors, and barely enough space in each cell to lie down. Either one or two persons were assigned to each cubicle. Each prisoner lay prone, chained to the floor or walls in opposite facing directions. They were stripped to their underwear, and slept on the floor without mats, blankets, or mosquito netting. They were chained to a common iron rod running the length of the corridor. Some rods were eighteen feet long and held twenty to thirty prisoners. They were not allowed to speak to each other, and were tortured several times a day. On the wall is a list of rules. One rule read, “It is forbidden to make a sound while you are being tortured. This is a great offense and you will get many lashes of electric wire.”
I kept thinking, What kind of savages could be so embittered, so cruel to treat their fellow countrymen this way? Later, I was shocked to discover the guards recruited by the Khmer were male and female children ten to fifteen years old. They started out normal, and quickly and enthusiastically deteriorated into despicable inhuman behavior. Where are these monsters now? The evidence is there. A black soul exists in every human being. Given the right training and conditioning, anyone can become a beast. Here was the evidence. The fact Western man is so well clothed and fed keeps this beast in us contained.
I walked downstairs, depressed and burdened by the cruelty. There were more rooms to enter. I dreaded what would be next. One room exhibited torture instruments the children used to break the prisoners’ bodies in every conceivable way. A picture gallery in one room showed people who once were alive, but now only a photo pinned on a wall. The Khmer were meticulous in photographing all the prisoners. Ten Western journalists who had been unfortunate to come within the grip of the Khmer were posted among them. They were among the twelve thousand people who perished in this place, or were taken to the “Killing Fields,” ten kilometers outside the city, and murdered along with three million of their fellow citizens. None of our group conversed for some time. We were all too shocked, disgusted, and dismayed at what we had seen.
We entered the final room on the tour, and were stunned to see one hundred white and brown skulls mounted on a wall, people who had died in this hellhole, a reminder to the world of the living of the nightmare that occurred here. I was overcome with grief. My friend Una who sometimes conducts prayer services at her Jewish temple was standing next to me. I whispered to her, “Let’s go to the wall and say Kaddish, (the Jewish prayer for the dead repeated by mourners in every Sabbath service.)” I placed my hand on one of the skulls, and we both recited. I spoke the words I knew from my childhood, Vayiskadal Vayishkadash Shama Rabo, and when I could remember no more, Una continued till it was done. All the while my hand was on the skull as she recited. My thoughts and feelings flowed from my soul to tell those people on the wall they were not forgotten. We honor their lives if only by their skulls, will not forget the unspeakable horrors they endured by shameless animals gone mad, and will forever carry an unquenchable burning sadness in our hearts for them.
“Rest in peace that you were denied in life.”
Epilogue: Since I wrote this story, the government of Cambodia removed the wall of skulls. They said they were deteriorating (which I doubt), and wanted to end the fear visitors have when visiting the museum. The truth is they did not want the tourists and others to be reminded of how cruel their living fellow countrymen were to their own citizens. When I visited Dachau in Germany, the directional signs and lettering to the concentration camps were very small and difficult to read. Nations try to hide their shame.
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Ira Spector is an author and freelance writer based in San Diego. This selection was republished from Spector’s 2011 work, Sammy Where Are You? .An Unconventional Memoir … Sort of. It is available via Amazon.