Fifteen kilometers away from the former Security Prison 21 is Choeung Ek, the most infamous of the sites known as The Killing Fields. It was an orchard before the Khmer Rouge turned it into one of its execution camps during its regime. Prisoners from the S-21 were sent to this place to get executed, and out of the thousands sentenced to death from 1975 to 1979, 8,895 bodies were discovered in the mass graves after the fall of the notorious regime.

Today, Choeung Ek is a memorial. At first impression one might get is that there is not much to see except for the Buddhist stupa that towers at the center of the field and the museum at the corner of the property. 

It’s not what you see that really counts but what transpired on the very ground you’re standing on. It’s when you start with the audio tour when heart will start bleeding.

The audio tour narrates the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, the detention of prisoners to the transportation to the filed for execution, the mass burials, survivors’ stories of and the fall of the evil regime. 

Around the field are marked signs or display cases -- mass graves, the hanging tree, the killing tree, bones and teeth of victims, clothes, etc., and each stop’s corresponding story is narrated in the audio player.

The Memorial Stupa, the towering central structure, is the last stop. 

On its architectural detail are Hindu and Buddhist symbols of Garudas, and Nagas. Traditionally these creatures, the mythical bird and the deity taking the form of a great snake, are enemies, but together it symbolizes peace. And, peace is what the stupa stands for, peace for the souls of more than 5,000 human skulls it holds and peace for the rest of victims of the mass execution. 

It is believed that there are more in the pits where the bodies were exhumed. Human bones still litter the site that on rainy days and the topsoil erodes, pieces appear from the ground.

There is an eerie silence to the place even with a good number of tourists present. Silence is requested upon entry to show respect, silent while intently listening to the audio player and silent after the tour.

I left this killing field with a heavy heart and I wasn’t alone with this condition, my friends also were and so do the rest of the Choeung Ek’s visitors.

The tuktuk ride back to the city was a quiet one and my friends and I needed something to shake us off our melancholic state. We knew what we had to do - shopping!

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Published in the Sun.Star Davao newspaper on October 11, 2012.

Making it to Siem Reap and finally seeing Angkor Wat was fulfilling. But knowing a little more of the country I was visiting would be a plus, and this is why I found myself in Phnom Penh.

A fellow traveler wanted us to make the most of our visit to Cambodia and planned a side trip to the capital city for us to see another facet of the country’s history, a more recent one.

I wasn’t entirely prepared for this part of the tour, I don’t think nobody will be. Yes, I’ve heard and read of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields, but to be standing on the very spot of the “incidents” was eerie, to say the least. It was nothing I expected.

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (Tuol Sleng means "Hill of the Poisonous Trees" or "Strychnine Hill”) was formerly the Chao Ponhea Yat High School campus converted by the Khmer Rouge into a prison and interrogation center-- Security Prison 21 or S-21, where the buildings were enclosed in barbed wires and the classrooms altered to tiny jails and torture chambers.

For four years, 1975-1979, S-21 held an estimated total of 17,000 prisoners (some suggested higher) that included government officials and soldiers of the previous regime, students, factory workers and professionals (academics, doctors, teachers, engineers, etc.) and even monks. The regime driven by paranoia, the count soon included members of the Khmer Rouge, people who were viewed as potential threat to Pol Pot.

Prisoners who were brought in were photographed, required to give autobiographies in detail, stripped, shackled in cells, slept on floors, forbidden to talk to each other, fed with four small spoonfuls of rice porridge and watery soup of leaves twice a day, drink water with permission, and hosed down every four days. Those who disobeyed the prison’s strict regulations were severely beaten. 

The museum shows hundreds of photographs of the prisoners.

Within two or three days after they were brought in, all prisoners were interrogated and tortured (beating, electric shock, hot metal searing, suffocation, hanging, etc.) into confessing to the crimes they were charged with. From the vast number of prisoners who were innocent, the torturing was able to draw false confessions.

If the prisoners didn’t die of some disease due to unhygienic living condition or committing suicide, the torturing did them in. Initially, S-21 was the burial ground to its victims and eventually ran out of space after the first year. It was then that prisoners were sent to the Choeung Ek extermination center were they were executed by iron bar battering, pickaxes, machetes and many other makeshift weapons. The bodies were then buried in masses.

S-21 was uncovered in 1979 by the invading Vietnamese army. Of the huge numbers of prisoners, only seven were presumed to have survived and as of September 2011, only three are said to be alive. I was able to meet one of the survivors, his name is Bou Meng and he related his story in a published book. 

Buo Meng, one of the 7 survivors of the S-21 prison, tells all in his book

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum was established in 1980, the year after the security prison was uncovered. It tells the unfortunate stories of S-21’s prisoners and the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge regime. Within its walls are the classrooms turned into torture chambers, shackles to bound the prisoners, the implements of torture and hundreds of faces in photographs of the prisoners.

The iron shackles that held the prisoners

Yes, I was not prepared for this. I exited the museum complex with a heavy heart. I can’t even speak. And the sad moment was far from over as my friends and I were heading to where the heartbreaking story of Cambodia continues.

For more travel & lifestyle stories, visit http://jeepneyjinggoy.blogspot.com/ and http://apples-and-lemons.blogspot.com/