Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

10 months into my stay here and with a new strategy in place to connect more with the country I'm currently living in, I decided it was time to go to the genocide museum, Tuol Sleng, the site of the infamous S21 prison. 

I'm not sure what took me so long. In many ways, I was reluctant to go because I had heard so many stories, knew what kind of atrocities and misery took place there. What happens when you enter that energy? I wasn't sure I wanted to find out. 

S21 used to be a high school. It was converted into a prison, one of the worst during the Khmer Rouge regime, and tens of thousands were detained, tortured, executed. These days, the buildings stand largely unchanged from the time. It is not so much of a museum as it is a testimony. The grass has grown back, the trees are blooming, but the barbed wire still rims the outside. There are few explanations - though guides can be used for an extra six dollars -- but for a few detailing the history of the place. For the rest, the buildings stand as their own witness for their bloody history. 

The signs of what happened there are small, but no less damning. The arch where prisoners were yanked up by their hands behind their back until they lost consciousness is still there, as are the pots that used to be filled with filthy water, used to make the prisoners regain consciousness in order to continue questioning. In the classrooms converted to cells, the bed frames remain, as well as the bar and cuffs for the feet. Or the cement block and the chains used to keep them there. 

In the Building C, the former classrooms are divided into tiny cells by brick or wood. The air is close there, but the cells are empty now. There is no smell, no remains, nothing but a few bloodstains on the floor. 

I had no way to connect to the sheer horror of what happened. The faces of the prisoners, in the pictures taken as they were checked in, are of all ages, men and women, children and older. They are just looking, uncomprehending, numbers on their chests. One was smiling defiantely. But they are only pictures. The blood on the floor, the bed frames -- only the grainy, black and white pictures of prostrate bodies where they were found are proof there were people here, suffering and dying. But the ego cannot think of it, can't even conceive of it. 

Something that I particularly noticed was the pictures of the citizens cheering the Khmer Rouge, thinking the civil war was over and peace was on the way.  

I was numb, wandering through the mostly empty halls and rooms, just the few remnants of pain scattered across swept floors. Even the room with the skulls, crushed bones, the pictures of fields filled with skeletons, it hardly seems real, these grainy photos of suffering.

I wanted to feel something, get a sense of the energy. But all I saw was suffering too great to be touched, to be shared at this instant in time, except to understand that what happened is beyond words. What happened there are memories now, but still there, like the building itself, right in the middle of the city. Quietly a part of life, inconceiveably ugly in its history and unnoticed by the outside world, but here.

The only real thing for me was a quick conversation with a curious and friendly the young Cambodian woman studying history, who wanted to know where I was from, how long I was in Cambodia, and if I was married (I'm 22, honey, not gonna happen any time soon), and the crew of motodop drivers trying to read the tattoo on my leg and asking, as people do when they figure it out, if I like to dance. It was like the color against a black and white world. 

That and the grass in the courtyard, brilliantly green and unkept.