The Killing Fields

This post will make little to no sense (and have little to no emotional impact) if you don't know what the killing fields are. The movie gives you a place to start from, but honestly, Wikipedia covers the basics pretty well.

We had the opportunity to visit the killing fields on June 23rd. We were also lucky enough to be the only people there. For some reason, I think that in a large crowd, the significance and reverence would've been lessened for me. Walking up, you come to a large, ornate commemorative stupa.

It's the only real building on the grounds, and it is certainly the tallest building in the area. Walking up the stairs of the stupa, you read "Would you please kindly show your respect to many million people who were killed under the genocidal Pol Pot regime." I remember specifically needing to sit down for a minute there, and read that a few times as it hit me. I had read a decent amount about Cambodian history during the Pol Pot regime, and reading this wasn't anything new, but I remember reading the words "many million" and realizing that that was something I couldn't really comprehend. The inside of the stupa is filled entirely with skulls of the victims that were discovered on site at the killing fields.

Those of you who know me fairly well know that I was a TA in the anatomy lab, and I took Advanced Anatomy focused on the nervous systems of the body. Skulls don't startle me, I know every little detail of the human skull, and I've held plenty of them. This was the first time, for me, that skulls were people. I wasn't learning neuroanatomy, I was beginning to really, actually wrap my brain around the meaning of genocide.
We walked around the grounds reading all of the signs, and looking at the pits of the mass graves. Each description seemed a bit more gruesome than the last. I'm not going to bog this down with each detail that we read about, but there were two particular signs that brought me to tears.

This tree was called "The Magic Tree", and it was used to hang a loudspeaker from, to drown out the sound of the victims as they were being executed. I don't think that I had ever thought through something so dehumanizing, and I hope I will never have to again. The other was the tree against which they would beat the child victims. I knew that millions had been killed, but I had avoided the inevitability that children were included in these numbers. It took my breath away seeing the thousands of bracelets that were left on and around this tree to commemorate the children that had lost their lives.

As we walked through the site, we all kind of spread out, and took things at our own pace. This was something that I needed to process on my own. On our way out, it began to lightly rain (which is unusual for Cambodia... it never rains lightly). I stopped, just in front of one of the mass graves, and watched as teeth, small bones, and fragments of the victims' clothing were slowly uncovered. Until then, I had (relatively) kept my composure, but this was the single most reverent and moving experience I have had. Intellectually, I knew what had happened here. But when I was standing there actually seeing it, I realized that I couldn't understand this intellectually at all. It needed to be felt.