The Victims of S21

*Published on **2018-09-28** by **Kelley @ traverse this earth** | Categories: Travel, solo travel*

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I walked into what looked like any school in the middle of any block in any city in the world. What is different about today is this was not any school in the middle of any block in any city in the world. I had been in Cambodia for a month and had finally made my way down to Phnom Penh. I wanted to see the places of the Khmer Rouge story I had become so familiar with.

(To see the documentary about this incredible history, visit [First They Killed My Father – A Documentary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS3Vp_quGCw). It’s based on a book called First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung and it is more than worth the read. She details the first-hand experience of the Khmer Rouge coming in and taking her family.)

At first glance, walking into the courtyard of S21 seemed rather normal. There were a few ominous white boxes and a big wooden square standing up but that was about it.

Even the first building seemed ordinary enough.

However, stepping inside would be crushing. The first room I went into held just a rotting bed with a few instruments on it. It still seemed like something out of a horror movie.

It turns out, that’s exactly what it was. Except this was no movie. This was S21, or Security Office 21, opened upon orders from Pol Pot. (For more information on him check my previous posts…[The Killing Fields](http://www.traversethisearth.com/2018/09/25/the-killing-fields/) and [The Khmer Rouge](http://www.traversethisearth.com/2018/07/06/the-khmer-rouge/).

Its uses included “detention, interrogation, inhumane torture and killing after confession” according to the info given there. People don’t often look into the face of savagery that humans perpetrate upon one another. It is bewildering to us. We ask, “How did this happen? How did we let it go so long? Why didn’t we stop it?” We would like to believe we are better than this. Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, what S21 became, would give us a look into the barbaric annihilation that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge brought to the world.

After the first room, I am greeted by another. The view from the outside gives me a flash of a memory that is not mine. It is a guard walking by as orders are carried out. I find myself wondering how this person feels to be in the position that they are, of watching or even taking part in the horror here.

I walk into this second room and feel an even heavier energy.

This is the room that brings the reality to light. Not only do I understand that the instrument on the bed is used to keep prisoners in place but there is a photo on the wall. In many of these rooms, there is a photo on the wall. It is the moment that S21 was found, the atrocities that were in the works just as someone walked in.

The box on the bed is where prisoners are allowed to urinate.

The desk is for the person “interrogating” them.

And the stains on the floor are from the blood of the last human beings that were there.

Even more disturbing, in this picture I see wetness. The actual moments that a persons life ran out of them.

With this picture I can imagine the guard running at the realization that it’s over, pushing the chair over and trying to save himself as the life runs out of the person in front of him. I spent a while in this room. It was not because I really wanted to. It was because I was rooted to the spot.

Once I got my bearings and moved on, I came back out into the courtyard. Walking across, I stepped into the second building. It is terrible but in a different way. The first building offered me visions of incredible torture. This one gave me life. Life at the possible very last moments of anything resembling normal. The faces looking back at me seemed as if they were any everyday photo taken at that time. A woman looking into the camera. But this woman is holding a child. Her child. She is in a place where less than a dozen people walked out of alive. In this moment, I found myself face to face with a woman who knew she was going to die, her entire life in her hands.

There were thousands of pictures of people who had come to S21 and never left. Thousands is not an exaggeration. And here we were staring at them. More than anything I felt the eyes of the children that had to go through this. There were plenty.

Most importantly, this child cut through me.

Maybe it was the clarity of the picture. Maybe the unfazed look of this child. No matter what, this person looked into me more than any other, and honestly, still does to this day. Just a picture of a picture, I feel this. There is nothing else. I can almost guarantee that this person, this child, did not make it out alive. He was not one of the less than ten survivors. Does it matter that he lives on? Does it matter that after 30 years his face is still hanging on this wall? His memory still intact? It’s a hard question. I find myself wrestling with it, even today. You know, some things hit you harder than others in life. Me? I found a picture of a boy I’d never met decades before me so intensely that I had to sit down. And in the middle of people walking through to experience this, I could only sit…and be.