genocide museum

last night the power went out in the area we are staying and it is still out today. we are in another area of phnom penh using the internet. we are hoping it goes back on tonight but we are not expecting it to.

yesterday we visited S-21 the genocide museum i mentioned we were going to in my last post. wow, it was extremely disturbing and very difficult to comprehend what happened there. i don't know that it really should even be called a museum. people were tortured and killed there and it has been very untouched since. the Khmer rouge interrogated innocent people there until they made a confession. apparently the regime kept a very detailed record of everyone they killed, along with a photograph of each person. these photographs are displayed on one of the floors of the building. the museum seems to have a long way to go to being preserved, but maybe it shouldn't be. the way we saw it was very real making it unimaginable.
on the third floor of one of the buildings you are not allowed inside but you can see between some of the slats in the broken shutters. we were peaking in and it looked as if the rooms had not been touched since the prison was rescued by the Vietnamese army in 1979. we could see picture boards made by the khmer rouge of victims. they were just stacked against the wall and on chairs and covered with dust. to think that history is sitting there like that and maybe noone will see it.

it is not exactly agreed upon as to how many people were killed by the Khmer rouge. some things we have read say around 2 million but we have heard cambodians say half the population, estimating around 3 million +. i guess they can not really know because they are still finding mass graves.

at S-21 prison they say around 20,000 were killed, but after we saw how unorganized the museum was we were thinking maybe they don't have an accurate count. also we had a guide tell us that they are not sure how many children died there.
we saw a map of the country labeling the mass graves that have been found they cover the entire country.
it's crazy to think how long this went on for without anyone doing anything. it took one day in 1979 of the Vietnamese army getting to phenom penh to put an end to it. our guide said the Khmer rouge were cowards and ran. well, many of them were children traind to kill.

when the Vietnamese made it to S-21 there were only 7 people left alive. today 3 of them are still living. one of them painted pictures of the horrific torture at the prison which are on display there.

we got our visas for vietnam and will be going there on the morning of the 24th.