Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [83]
With the departure of U.S. forces from Vietnam and no other country willing to intervene, Pol Pot began his bloody reign. His first act was to invite all the educated populace back into the city, upon which he promptly executed them. Torture became a way of life and death for thousands. In time, to save the cost of bullets, most of the executions were carried out by striking the victim on the back of the head with thick bamboo poles. Over the next few years, more than a million people were killed, either through enforced hardship, or executions in what are now known as the Killing Fields.
On the flight, Micah and I anticipated our arrival with a degree of ambivalence. Though we wanted to see both the museum and the Killing Fields, our excitement was tempered by our apprehension. This, unlike so many of the sites, wasn’t part of ancient history; it was modern history, home to events that people want to forget despite knowing that they never should.
From the outside, the Holocaust Museum looked unremarkable. A two-story, balconied building set off the main road, it resembled the high school it had originally been. But belying its innocuous appearance was the sinister barbed wire that still encircled it; this was the place where Pol Pot tortured his victims.
Our guide, we learned, had attended school there, and it felt disconcerting, almost surreal, when he pointed to his former classroom, before moving us to the exhibits.
They were a series of horrors: a room where they used electricity to torture victims; other rooms featured equally horrific devices. The rooms hadn’t been altered since Phnom Penh had been reclaimed, and on the floors and walls, bloodstains were still visible.
So much that we saw that day seemed beyond belief; the fact that most of the Khmer Rouge were children was almost too appalling to contemplate. We were told that the Khmer Rouge soldiers dispatched their victims without remorse and with businesslike efficiency; children killing mothers and fathers and other children by striking them on the back of the head. My oldest son was roughly the same age as the soldiers, which made me sick to my stomach.
On the walls were pictures of the victims. Some pictures showed prisoners being tortured; others showed the bodies unearthed in the Killing Fields. In either corner of the main room, there were two small temples that housed the skulls of those victims who’d been discovered in the camp after the guards had fled. On the wall was a painting of a young boy in a soldier’s uniform, striking and killing a victim in the Killing Fields. The artist, we learned, had lost his family there.
No one on the tour could think of anything to say. Instead, we moved from sight to sight, shaking our heads and muttering under our breath. Awful. Evil. Sad. Sickening.
More than one member of the tour had to leave; the intensity was overwhelming.
“Did you lose anyone in your family?” I finally asked the guard.
When he answered, he spoke steadily, as if he’d been asked the question a thousand times and could answer by rote. At the same time, he couldn’t hide a quality of what seemed almost stunned disbelief at his own words.
“Yes, I lost almost all of them. My wife, my father, my mother. My grandparents. All my aunts and uncles.”
“Did you have any siblings?”
“Yes,” he said, “a younger brother.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t seen him since the war. He was a member of the Khmer Rouge.”
We traveled to the outskirts of Phnom Penh and turned toward the Killing Fields. On either side of the dirt road were run-down houses; halfway up the street was a garment factory, and dozens of women were clustered outside, sitting in the dirt eating lunch as we passed.
Impossible to recognize unless you knew the location, the Killing Fields appeared as a ditch-strewn field, remarkably similar to the rest of the countryside we’d passed. It was far smaller than I imagined it would be—maybe a hundred yards to