What really got me about S21 was the portraits of the prisoners. The guards were meticulous about photographing everyone who came into the prison. All these beautiful faces photographed, and such dignity in their expressions. None of them survived. All tortured and executed. And for what? A lifeless ideology; sterile concepts. Its amazing how inhumane we can be when we stop seeing people as sacred beings and conceptualise them as "the enemy." So much suffering, so terribly sad.
And here are some portraits of the guards of the prison, and torturers. Equally beautiful faces. Also innocent victims of an ideology; a ruthless system that gave them no choice. Prisoners of a system who often ended up as actual prisoners in the paranoid last years of Pol Pot's rule.
The Killing Fields
All the prisoners at S21, after being interrogated and tortured, were then brought to The Killing Fields, just outside town, to be executed. As many as 20,000 are buried here. And this is just one of a multitude of other killing fields all over Cambodia. As many as 3 million are thought to have died during Pol Pot's ruthless regime. That's over 25% of Cambodia's population at the time. It really boggles the mind. And this all happened in my lifetime: 1975 - 1978.
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| 8000 of the bodies and have been exhumed and their skulls put in a monument. |
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| The infamous "killing tree" and another tree that contained speakers that blared out revolutionary music to drown out any screaming. |
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| The Killing Fields today is a surprisingly peaceful place with birds singing and a beautiful little lake. It feels like a place of healing. |
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