Horror before my eyes. S21 and the Choeung Ek kilingfields.

Today was tough. A day that made an imprint. Today i went to the Choeung Ek killingfield outside Phnom  Penh and to the Tuol Sleng prison, codenamed S 21. Two sites where Khmer Rouge unfolded their activities at its most gruesome. and two places where history isn't theory. It is reality. So real that my guide, a woman that as a 13 year old experienced the big emptying of the capital enforced by Khme Rouge on April 17th 1975, just hours after they arrived in town. She survived the nightmare only to find her family decimated. No one will leave these places untouched. It is places one should not rush trough. It is a days worth of work.

The prison rules. They give little room for personal joy.

The former school buildings got dressed in barbed wire after a female inmate managed to jump from the 2nd or third floor, committing a successfull suicide. Khmer Rouge didn't want more of that!

Hastily built brickcells on the first floor. They were tiny with no form for luxury-no bed. no carpet. The toilet was a small metalbox. There were not even a door-the prisoners were monitored all the time by constantly patrolling guards. The doors weren't needed-every prisoner was chained to the floor in short leach.

Upstairs wooden cells-with doors.

Leg irons. Up to nine prisoners were chained in one long bar.

A photo of one of the mass holding cells.

a collection of prisoners mugshots.

Torture bucket-the original one. Its way of use depicted below.

This, and many other paintings, of the barbarity of S 21 were painted by Vann Nath, one of the seven adults to emerge from the prison alive. He died a couple of years ago. His painting skills was what kept him alive. Making these paintings was for him the keeping of a promise: when his group rived at S 21, they agreed that those surviving had to tell the world the story about S 21. So he did in his own way.

The gallows today. Once used to train students. The Khmer Rouge's way of use seen below.

It is difficult to tell which photo made the biggest impression. This one is a clear candidate. A pretty young girl lying on the floor. Photographed after death by torture and abuse.

A photo showing a dead body in one of the former classrooms. The next photo shows...

....the same room as it stands today. Exactly the same, minus the body. A very confronting experience. There are several other displays just like this one in other rooms.

The memorial stupa at the Choeung Ek site. It sits close to the truckstop, where the trucks transporting prisoners from S 21 arrived. From there it was only a short walk to the final end. To start with, thee were trucks only a couple nights every week, eventually it became a nightly event. So many prisoners arrived that from time to time-up to 300 a day.It was impossible to "process" everybody. They wee held in a wooden prison, awaiting  next murder night. In total more than 17.000 people were killed here. More than 8000 of them are now in the memorial stupa-arranged by  age and gender. 43 out of 129 known massgraves are left untouched.

After the Khmer rouge was driven away, locals found human remains, including brain tissue on the trunk of this beautiful tree. It was used to crush the skulls of children. One grabbed them in the legs-and swung them to the trunk....just beside, under the roof-is their mass grave.

This tree played little less gruesome role than did the killing tree. This one was used for loudspeakers playing loud traditional music. To hide the victims screams. To surrounding settlements it would sound like there was a Khmer Rouge meeting....again!

The long leaf stems of the sugarpalm....usefull as a cutting tool to cut throats and even decapitate slowly. 

Bones regularly surface in some of the massgraves, especially now in the rainy season. The caretakers frequently take rounds, collecting bones.

Pieces of clothing also surface.

Skulls in the big memorial stupa. a study in forensic science. You learn to identify people killed by ironbars, the characteristic looking sugarpalmknife or machetes and hammers.

Human remains are arranged in 17 tiers, the nine lower ones exclusively deal with skulls. The remaining ones all other bones.

Wire that once embraced a victim.