How would you stare death in the face?

With a look of confusion?

A look of sheer terror?

Pure denial?

Desperation?  

Anxiety?

Or, would you stare back with a sly smirk?

Each face had a story to tell and I wondered what their stories could have revealed. Lives filled with vibrancy.  I studied a few hundred portraits, fascinated by each unique disposition. There were rows and rows of them. My eyebrows arched in confusion at mug shots of children and mothers with their babies.  No one was exempt. Prisoners ranged from intellectuals, professors, engineers to farmers, ministers, and technicians. They were mostly Cambodians, but a few were Vietnamese, Thai, British, Pakistanis, Laotians, American, British, or New Zealanders.

I had to stop looking because they were staring right back at me.

Alive.

A visit to Cambodia is incomplete without a visit to Tuol Sleng, the former Khmer Rouge S-21 prison, or the killing fields. The Khmer Rouge was the ruling political party of Cambodia, headed by communist, Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979. In just four (4) years, close to 2 million people were killed. People were collectively picked out if they fitted one or more of the following categories:

• Connections to the previous ruling party or diplomatic ties

• Other ethnicities

• Homosexuals

• Lack of agricultural ability

• Anyone with an education

The irony is that the grounds of Tuol Sleng used to be a high school; previously investing in the future of Cambodian children through education. Thousands of mass graves dot Cambodia known as the killing fields.  In most cases, victims had to dig their own graves and were executed with hammers and axes as a way of saving ammunition. The sense of loss was unfathomable. The skulls and bones bear testament to a vicious holocaust that happened just thirty (30) years ago.

This wasn’t my first genocide museum visit.

I’d previously visited concentration camps in Poland and Germany. I’d also been to the Terror Museum in Budapest, where, within its bowels, I met an old man. He was shaking. He seemed perplexed. Anxious to find someone to share his story, he found me.

He pointed to a dark, cold room.

“That was my cell,” he cried to me. “I was there.”