I recently visited Tuol Sleng Museum and the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. Both are potent and vivid memorials to the genocide overseen by Pol Pot during the 1970s, in which up to perhaps 3,000,000 Cambodians were slaughtered in gruesome circumstances.

At the memorial of the Killing fields of Choeung Ek

Pol Pot was a mad man who was hell-bent on creating a perfect Communist society. Paranoid to the hilt, he trusted no one and operated on the assumption that killing all of his enemies (real or imagined) was the best way to stay safe.

Visiting the Killing Fields is a harrowing experience. The grounds are hauntingly beautiful and a self-guided audio tour enables visitors to reflect at their own pace. The grounds are actually shifting, as the rains and weather expose the remains of mass graves from time to time. It’s not uncommon to come across a fragment of bone or a scrap of cloth from a shallow mass grave. Visitors, of course, are simply asked to not touch these and to let the grounds keepers move and preserve them accordingly.

My first thought while visiting the genocide museum at Tuol Sleng was, “why does genocide keep happening?” At the end of the Second World War the nations of the world said “never again” to mass atrocities like the genocide that took place in Nazi Germany, in which some 6,000,000 Jews were slaughtered at the behest of Adolf Hitler. Yet, decade after decade, genocide continues, whether it’s the mass killings of Cambodians in the 1970s, Rwandans in the 1990s, or the Sudanese in the 2000s. We, as a people, as a planet, allow the darkest reaches to consume us, it would seem. It makes me wonder where genocide will occur next. Sadly, I think it’s a matter of when it will happen, not if.

It was gruesome to visit the torture rooms at Tuol Sleng. In each room was a photograph of the last person tortured and murdered, along with the actual rack upon which the torturing would take place. (The Khmer Rouge, like the Nazis, were meticulous record keepers. There literally thousands of photos they documented of the Cambodians they arrested and tortured.)

Torture Room at Khmer Rouge Prison S-21

Tuol Sleng was originally a high school, but during the rule of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, the facility was turned into a secret prison, S-21, in which the innocent were held captive and tortured until they confessed whatever crimes they were accused of.

Only a handful of survivors remain from S-21. One of them, Bou Meng, was at Tuol Sleng when I visited. He’s an old man now. I purchased a copy of his biography, which is part of his efforts to teach others of what happened. In his book he writes, “Sorrow and pain have always stuck in my mind and have become a shadow that always follows me. …I will not forget the past, but I don’t want to live again through what I experienced. I want to close this dark chapter through legal means. Although I am growing older, I am still looking forward to the first trial [of the Khmer Rouge tribunal] with hope and confidence. My wish is that such atrocities will never happen again anywhere on earth.”

With Bou Meng, a survivor from Khmer Rouge Prison S-21