All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [42]
Pol Pot was a meticulous killer who wanted everyone inventoried, so the interrogators at Tuol Sleng kept detailed records. The walls of the museum are covered with stunning photographs of each murdered person, like a perverse high school yearbook. Visitors, most of them Cambodians who had lost family in the genocide, were holding one another, sobbing openly as they stared at the exhibits. I cried with them, totally overwhelmed. Some of the photographs seemed to speak. They were taken the instant mothers were separated from children, as vicious tricks were played, promises of amnesty made, and then torture and murder committed. There was one child who especially disturbed me; sometimes a face is archetypal, and in it I see other faces. This little boy reminded me of Dario. I was shattered. It was a haunting, deeply disturbing experience.
Later that day we visited a clinic, clean though very modestly outfitted, run by one of PSI’s partners. I sat with a woman stricken with AIDS, wasting away on her deathbed. When I asked about her family, all she could whisper was “Pol Pot,” indicating they had all been murdered.
I was beginning to grasp the intergenerational nature of trauma, how the whole population of Cambodia was scarred. Survivors were haunted; children carried their parents’ grief and guilt. A Cambodian doctor I met had survived the Pol Pot regime by pretending to be an illiterate peasant. He worked in a forced labor camp, and for four years, one wrong word, one allusion, one careless gesture, would have betrayed his true identity and led to his execution. He carried on his grueling charade even though it meant watching others die when he knew he could help them. The doctor’s desperate strategy worked, and he survived. He was now the head of Cambodia’s malaria prevention program.
To me, his story illustrated both the tragedy and the resiliency of the Cambodian people. It was one of many I would hear. The minister of commerce was twenty when Pol Pot came into power. He lost seventy-two relatives to the genocide—his entire extended family from every living generation. He told me they were so desperate for help from America, they would use rocks to spell out S-O-S on the ground, hoping that when the surveillance planes flew over, the pilots would see their message and rescue them. But the Americans had destroyed Cambodia with bombs, then abandoned the country to murderers.
Incrementally, we are making amends. I visited an American–run free hospital for the poor in Phnom Penh called Center of Hope. And USAID has been funding crucial medical projects through NGOs like PSI and its local partners. The years of war, genocide, and mass migration had turned Cambodia into one of the world’s poorest countries and a nation of orphans and widows. In 2004, women headed a quarter of households, and most earned less than a dollar a day. Many women, devoid of alternatives, succumbed to prostituted sex work to survive or were lured to the city in search of factory jobs only to be tricked, forced, coerced, and outright kidnapped into brothels, from which there is usually no escape. Desperate parents sometimes knowingly turned their young daughters over to brothels to help work off their debts, to raise money to feed other mouths at home. Some were sold outright to traffickers for international sex slavery.
Our guide into Phnom Penh’s netherworld of prostitution and trafficking was the great Mu Sochua, then Cambodia’s minister of women’s and veterans’ affairs and one of the most inspirational people I have met. She is a tiny, delicate woman with high cheekbones and a quiet, implacable resolve. Sochua was a student in 1972 when she was able to flee Cambodia and the war, but her parents were killed in the genocide. After eighteen years of exile in Europe and the United States, where she earned degrees in social work and psychology, Sochua returned to help rebuild her shattered country. She founded Khemara—one of PSI’s partners—the first ever