Killing Fields & S.21 - Pnomh Penh Cambodia

We´re in Berlin and it is soooo dope. The city is literal Eden for electronica. The music everywhere is insnane... the best minimal house and techno and funky cutting edge. Yesterday we did a bunch of touristy stuff, like see the wall, the famous gate, some crazy memorials, the hotel where Michael Jackson held the baby out the window, the location of Hitler´s bunker. Last night, the 1st bar outdoors and covered in Graffiti, and a belligerent German guy dressed in fireman garb got wild with flame throwers. Tonight we`re lucky enough to party with a local girl whose got her fingers deep in the local music biz. YES.


**Click on a photo to see a bigger version. Make sure you can read the signs in the photos.**

Close friend/ pseudo-sister Jen Sciacqua met up with us on February 27. Prior to the trip, she, like us, had never really ventured outside the country. She was a little apprehensive to explore a place like Cambodia. Brad & I remember that fluttery angst well. It just so happened that on her 1st day, the best use of our time was to visit 2 of the most horrific museums in the world: S.21 prison & Killing Fields. Welcome to the world.

**There was a genocide in Cambodia from 1975-78. An man named Pol Pot came to power & sought a self-sustained Agrarian country, an obscene version of communism, literal stone-age. His political party had many names, but the most common is Kemer Rouge. Pot separated families and outlawed their important tradition of eating together. He systematically tortured millions of all ages, races, and genders, targeting anyone educated whatsoever, had any contact with Vietnamese, spoke another language, was not impoverished, wore glasses!? etcetera. He transformed the country's largest high school (consisting of 4 x 4-story buildings) into a prison-death-camp. It's called S.21 and located in the capital city, Phnom Penh. Dozens of mass graves were found in the '80s. The biggest was from S.21, and located in the outskirts of Pnom Penh, dubbed The Killing Fields**

Jen arrives from the airport glowing but burnt from the sleepless 22 hour trip. It's 10am—big warm hugs and the 3 of us move into our hotel room. We walk down narrow metal stairs to the street. Bradon begins the haggling circus & scores an all-day Tuk-Tuk (SE Asian moto-taxi) for 8 bucks. Nice. We arrive The Killing Fields, bouncing through the entrance, stop then exit onto dead grass. The sun is now at noon.



Strangeness in the dust. Smiling feels wrong and my cheeks strangle. We slowly buy tickets. We walk toward a 60-foot tower—continuous windows crawl up all 4 sides to a pyramid roof of golden horns. We squint through the windows...the tower is filled with skulls, human skulls, 1000s of them, some in tact and others cracked, others with bullet holes, stacked on shelf after shelf. My mouth and eyes relax, my body aches, my naive heart squeezes. The front door is open.

We stand in front hearing recorded twing-twang music, instruments melancholy slow and drawn-out, over which crying vocals scant (imagine the sputtered hymns of a frail mother mourning her murdered child). It's all big and deep and creeps into OUR skulls. We stand there gripping incense and flowers, praying, paying respect. Then I realize a constant breeze, and hear children playing nearby.



I leave the Jen and Brad at the memorial. In the distance I see a chain-link fence. It stretches out far behind the memorial. I cannot see where it ends. Along its edge, outside the park, young local boys play like boys will—shows of bravado, shoves and punches, and behind them (surrounding the whole Killing Fields) is a vast, sun-scorched rice farm.

I crouch behind a tree and take candid photos of the kids, but they notice me and start posing funny, so I take a few more. Then I approach them. When I'm close (dang the rice farm is reeeally decrepit) they stretch their arms through the fence begging, whining. I see the grease in their hair, their crusty nostrils and dusty foreheads; some clasp their hands prayer-like. I can't help but shell out 3 dollars but they don't stop begging. Can't afford to save the world. I continue along a trail which runs parallel to the fence. I pass by countless half-sphere holes, each at least 20ft in diameter, obvious mass graves. Then I come to a large, still lake, which marks the back of The Killing Fields. Haunting.



I walk the lake's edge and 1 boy follows from behind the fence “Pleeease-low. Monee-low. I have no fooood-low. I have no peellow-low. No penseel-low. Pleease monee-lowwww” and he follows me crying these things over and over until after 15 minutes of walking I break and fork something over. Another boy runs right up and the routine repeats, but now I've finished the trail. I can see the memorial. I walk toward the interior, away from the sad kids.

I weave between more mass graves. There's a tree with human bones around its roots. Stop, look down. A canine is beside my shoe.




We arrive S.21. I walk inside a cell. On the wall is a life-size photo of someone killed by electric torture. Blood drips from the cringing corpse, like oil. My heart vices in vomit. My every muscle and my every fiber of my every ligament shudders. Indigestion boils so I seek refuge in the sun, but my familiar star's without reassurance. Instead it shouts sourness inside me, and I'm blanketed in horrid nostalgia: I feel the power of mad spirits yelling at me, and yet, these ghastly phantasms are arm-locked with innocence; I concurrently feel the good souls of the murdered, the hundreds upon thousands of good people victimized in the sad despot insanity.
It's overwhelming.

rules for the prisoners


Eventually, you walk into another 4-story building. The bottom floor is 1 single hall. Large boards fill it, on which countless mugshots are plastered... men, women, children, elders, many with bruised brows, swollen cheeks and ears, matted hair. But it's their eyes that haunt you the most. In every shot the inmate looks directly into the camera, expressions of confused terror, or pure animosity. Even more, you know portrait paintings where the subject's eyes follow you? Most are like that. A horrific gauntlet.


You walk toward another building. The breezeways are wrapped with barb wire. A sign explains that all 4 buildings were once like this. It prevented inmates from jumping. It prevented suicides. Now inside a room. Shabby brick walls divide it into smaller cells, individual holding cells. You walk in one and see chains mortared in the brick. Another cell has a battery on the ground, clearly once used for electric torture.

We've all felt deeply disturbed by something, disturbed to the point of confusion. When you're young and naively exist in a fog of innocence, true-evil is a fairytale. Then 1 day you experience something inherently wrong, something totally faux pas to you, and life becomes understood on a much truer level. Jen, Brad, and I began the day abreast; we ended it wide-eye hunched over.