day 3: genocide museum

posted by michaelangelo


today was a touching and emotional day for all of us who visited the genocide museum. this museum was an old school that was made into a torture chamber by the khmer rouge during the genocide. they used this school for interrogations.

as we first arrived we watched a movie. this movie was narrated in muffled english and was hard to understand. it was a sad movie but afterward i was ok. then we entered the first building. in this building there were bedrooms with metal bed frames in the middle of the rooms. on the bed frames were ankle braces and chains, and sometimes empty boxes of bullets. in the next building there were classrooms, about 5 or 6 of them in a row. in these classrooms were the pictures of every person that entered the camp. after some time i couldnt bear to stay in the room any longer and look at the faces of those who died in the camp.
i stood out side for a while and then moved on to the next building. in this building there were more classrooms about another 5 or 6, but these rooms divided into cells by brick walls that the soldiers had built there. this was sickening because the cells were so small and in some of them the chains that held people down were still in the cell. there were so many cells, room after room.
at the last building we went to i walked into one room full of more pictures of the victims. in the next room were tools used for torture and methods of torture that the khmer rouge used.

i could'nt understand how humans could do this to each other.