The brochure said:
Genocide Museum
TUOL SLENG
Former Office S.21
"Kampuchea Democratic"
19-75-1979
Hailey, walking through one of the old classrooms they divided into tiny individual cells.
2 million people were killed during that time. This was a torture and detention center.
Part of the compound in the sunlight of 2010
Afterward, we all needed alone time.
The building was a school before they made it into a prison. Those tiled hallways used to have kids walking through them.
One of the prisoners painted pictures of what happened while he was there.
It used to be a school....
This was one of the hardest parts for me. Tourists wrote on the walls in the stairwells all sorts of things. None of it seemed good enough...and all of it seemed too late.
There were walls and walls of pictures of the prisoners they killed. They kept records of everything.The worst parts I couldn't bring myself to take pictures of. But we walked into the cells where they tortured the prisoners, saw the blood stains on the tile. The compound went on forever.
Emotionally, going through that was...overwhelming. After the first five minutes I just had the Lord's prayer on repeat in my head. How else do you deal with that?
The brochure said:
Genocide Museum
TUOL SLENG
Former Office S.21
"Kampuchea Democratic"
19-75-1979
For greater things have yet to come
and greater things are still to be done here.
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