Killing Fields: Horrors of the Khmer Rouge

There are some tourist attractions in the world that are not really enjoyable to see, but people go there nonetheless. Maybe it is for the shock value, maybe it is just to get a better understanding of a country's history and a glimpse into what horrible deeds humans are actually capable of once they've been brainwashed enough. What the Khmer Rouge did to Cambodia certainly qualifies for one of the most horrific regimes ever on the planet, what they did to their own people was even worse than Hitler or Stalin...
First we went to the Killing Fields just outside Phnom Penh. They have built a big tower there with 9000 skulls of all the people that they have dug out so far from the mass graves (there's alot of unopened mass-graves left). There was even a mass grave for women and children, and there's a tree they smashed babies against to kill them... When you walk through the graves that have been opened you see pieces of clothing sticking out of the ground, it is quite creepy.

The ironic thing is that the whole place is really nice and idyllic with nice trees and a lake nearby. One could say that like this it is pretty much like a graveyard, but then again this isn't anything like a final resting place, because all these thousands of people weren't just buried, but also killed there.


Just thinking that the Khmer Rouge people who worked there probably had a normal life, going drinking with friends, going home to their wives after having killed 300 people every day is quite impossible to imagine...


Afterwards we went to the S-21 prison where people were "questionned" and detained before being brought to the Killing Fields for execution. They have thousands of pictures there that the Khmer Rouge took of the detainees, it is really eerie, just imagining that all the skulls we had seen before actually are all that remains of the people you see on these pictures. Some of them even smile, and there's very many children, too...


They have tiny 2 squaremeter cells where they kept the "better" detainees, the normal ones were just chained to a big bar in one of the bigger rooms. There's no beds in the whole place so everybody had to sleep on the floor and also piss and shit there.
The numbers vary a bit, but there was anything from 14.000 to 20.000 people in S-21, and only 6-14 of them made it out alive. And this is S-21, so there were at least 20 other facilities like this all throughout Cambodia...