Story: The Killing Fields

I arrive in Phnom Penh in the early afternoon. After the wide expanses of Angkor Wat, Phnom Penh seems crowded, dirty, hustling, and slightly dangerous. At my guest house I contract with a moto driver who offered to take me to see the Pol Pot-related sights: first to the famous political prison Tuol Sleng, a converted schoolhouse where prisoners were kept in squalor until they were executed, and then to Choeung Ek, the killing fields outside the city which were now preserved as a memorial. I wander through the school, examining the tiny, dank cells where prisoners lived and pictures of the victims, hundreds of them, many painfully young. Finally, feeling thoroughly depressed, I climb onto the back of the moto and hold on for dear life as my driver speeds out of the city and onto bumpy dirt roads alongside empty green fields.

After a short time we pull onto a long dirt driveway that leads through a set of dusty gates. I hop off and my driver waves me in the direction of a large tower with an ornate yellow roof. Not until I am fairly close do I realize that the shelves behind the glass front are filled with human skulls, piled in artful, horrifying jumbles. They are grouped by age and sex of the victims, and the shelves for children's skulls are pitifully full. As I tip my head back to examine the shelf just above eye level, I feel my breath disappear...the shelves keep going, more and more and more, above my head, reaching the full height of the enormous stupa. So many skulls, each one a person murdered. This is the power of the memorial: you are overwhelmed by the magnitude of Pol Pot's crime, while at the same time painfully aware of the individual deaths that comprised it. As I stare at the skulls, I become aware of faint sounds of shouting and laughter. I look around and see that a few hundreds feet away is a wall which separates the killing fields from an elementary school playground.

After lighting a few sticks of incense, I move away from the stupa and begin to walk around the excavated burial pits, some of which are marked by placards giving the history of the fields and the gruesome specifics of the people's deaths. Here and there on the ground are bits of cloth, remnants of the excavation process. I try not to step on any, though some are so dirty and trampled that they blend in with the path. The burial pits are now thoroughly overgrown with grass and even some wildflowers. In the warm, fading light of late afternoon, the field is green and lovely.

I notice movement, and I see that there are dozens of small orange and black butterflies fluttering in the fields, dipping in and out of the burial pits, settling on flowers, taking off again. It seems almost unbearably poetic that in this place where so many died, creatures which symbolize freedom and fragility and the soul are making a home.

Riding away from the memorial I feel drained and yet somehow peaceful. I was glad I went, glad that the victims will be remembered, and glad that life in its many forms seems to somehow renew and struggle on.