The sky was cloudy and depressing, threatening more than just drizzle on that day I toured S-21, a high-school-turned-torture-museum in Phnom Pen, Cambodia.  It’s not important whether or not you know the place is now called Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, or that only seven of the 17,000 people held there survived.  It doesn’t matter if you’ve ever heard of the Khmer Rouge, or if you’ve forgotten about Pol Pot, the former leader who died remorseless and of natural causes 20 years after his crimes against humanity, and never having been tried for the death, starvation, or “smashing” of 1.7 million of his fellow countrymen.  You don’t have to know that the word “smashing” was used in official documents declaring the death penalty, and that coincidentally most of the men, women, and children who were killed were simply bashed in the back of the head with rifle butts, pipes, or clubs before falling into the pits where their throats were cut in order to conserve ammunition.  It doesn’t matter too much that the smallest victims, infants and toddlers, were whipped violently against tree trunks for more precise and efficient smashing.  Or that the Khmer Rouge confined, tortured, and killed men whose only crime was that they wore glasses (anyone educated was perceived as an enemy).  None of that matters because I only want to tell you about that high school, S-21, where prisoners were interrogated and tortured until they uttered the name of every person whom they had ever known, lived with, and worked with, who were then in turn arrested, imprisoned and forced to give up every name of every person that they knew, and so on. 

Upon entry to the gated grounds of the museum, I feel the heaviness of death like scars from the past still bleeding, still painful to the touch.  There’s a large courtyard that could be lush and refreshing, but it’s not.  Around the courtyard, in a U-shape, are several doors opening to smallish rooms once used for educating and expanding the minds of young Cambodians, but not used for that any more.  From April of 1975 to January of 1979, those once bright rooms were turned into chambers of violence and inhumanity incomprehensible to most. 

 

I was prepared for the storybook torture chamber, typically a dim basement tucked deep in the bowels of some ancient castle.  But what I got were well-lit schoolrooms, some complete with blackboards incongruously mounted beside fixtures of death and doom.  I’d heard about this place, like I’d heard about other nifty backpacker destinations around Southeast Asia, but no one had told me about the bloodstains still on the tiled classroom floors.  I’d heard about the implements of torture left in the rooms for tourist viewing, but I never imagined there would be so many; beds with shackles for both hands and feet, chains anchored to the floor in the corner like the ones used to confine a dog in a backyard, iron head masks with ear and eye holes where rodents or poisonous jungle centipedes were dropped, and other strange props whose uses I dare not imagine.

 

I have trouble viewing all the rooms.  The first and second converted classrooms satisfy the urge to peek up death’s skirt.  I peer into the third and fourth torture chambers for the same reason that you rewind the grotesque crime scene footage of a documentary murder video.  After that, I have to make myself look inside, if only for an instant, to be sure that I have seared the images of mankind’s dark potential into my consciousness.  I have my camera in my hand the whole time, but I see nothing that I’d ever want to see again.  Or anything I’d want to show someone else within a pack of photos of scenic smiles and beautiful beaches.  

  
I can’t show you the unprecedented and surprisingly accurate records and photos that were kept of the thousands of unwilling guests who moved through S-21 on their way to “smashing”.   But I could tell you that there were more pictures of dead Cambodians framed and hung on those high school walls than on any other wall in any other school that I have ever seen before or since.  Thousands and thousands of pictures, some faced front then profiled like mug shots, of people not memorialized for their excellence in education or achievements within that institution, but captured by a lens on their way to meet death.  Faces which are grim and listless, but that would soon be screaming for the pain to stop.  Eyes that flicker with the tiniest glimmer of life and hope, but that would soon be glossy and swollen with the expenditure of tears that accompanies being beaten until broken.  After viewing a few of the large collages of Asian faces, I forget about the circumstances and begin noticing—like you would with the photos in somebody’s old yearbook—humorously odd hair and facial features,.  Then I catch myself and return to the reality that every face I stare at, every set of eyes peering back at me, has been wiped from our midst with a blunt smash and a deep slice or, if they were lucky, a bullet to the head.  “These people are all dead,” I say to myself, then feel sickly ashamed at being alone and alive among so many dead effigies whose eyes never blink and whose gazes never leave you. 

 

There are more pathetic photos than I have either the time or the stomach to see, so I move on.  I round the final bend in the building and, as I walk past those last few classrooms, the sky finally begins to give in and rain harder.  I hop over a few puddles while trying to cover my head and then realize, “I am alive and breathing while nearly everyone else who came through here was savagely tortured and brutally murdered.”  Suddenly a little water, no matter how cold or muddy, simply doesn’t mean so much. 

 

I wonder, like most anyone who goes there does, how these things happen, how human beings can listen to the blood-curdling screams of other human beings day in and day out, how young men can be made to follow orders and commit such hideous atrocities.  Before I can arrive at any possible answers, I look up to see that I have exited the grounds of S-21 and walked back into the muddy roadway where I am awaited by a dozen locals, each with random limb missing.  Before I had even gotten a chance to try and come to terms with the museum of torture formerly a high school, I was getting yet another repulsing visual onslaught   I think about coughing up a pitiful dollar, as I have done before with indigents in Asia, to the first ambitious cripple who solicits, but there are simply too many of them.  I give my little scooter driver an emotionally drained but confused look, and he tells me that these Cambodians have lost their arms, legs, hands, or feet to landmines planted during the Vietnam War.

 

“Ah yes, war” I think to myself.    “Mankind’s method of establishing and maintaining peace.  That’s how these things happen.”     

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