An Obligation To Inform

“I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.”

- John D. Rockefeller

I started out writing this blog as an outlet for stories to be told. I figured that as I traveled, I’d be motivated to write the stories of inspirational people, of breathtaking locations, and of even my own honest and complicated inner workings. However, I don’t think that even I fully understood the extend of the responsibility from what I set out to do.

Recently, I was reminded of the rights, opportunities, and possessions that I have been fortunate enough to be graced with. With that enlightening knowledge, I now have a higher understanding and ownership of what my responsibilities, obligations, and duties are.

So here it goes:

As a granddaughter of a history teacher, I grew up learning to love the stories of people who lived many centuries before us, of the customs that ruled kingdoms, and of the ideals that both saved and damned empires. My grandpa had an incredible ability of making history come alive. He didn’t read from textbooks or assign monotonous shallow essays. He had a passion for teaching and thus, he challenged his students (and myself) to think deeper.

For example….

It wasn’t just the story of some old deceased Egyptian, who’s life had no parallels or commonalities with your own life….

Instead, it was the riveting story of King Tutankhamun, who became king at a mere 9 years old and who died only 10 years later from a mysterious reason. A boy who was forced into a life of royalty and who suffered just like you and I.

This difference in storytelling is what made all the difference to the thousands of people my grandfather influenced. By stimulating us all to imagine ourselves in these time periods and situations, he created in me, an extremely strong sense of empathy. Through his ethos, he taught us all that history wasn’t just something that solely remained in the past….it was a life that once lived but whose ancestors remained, an era that once ruled yet influenced generations, and lessons that should still be learned and applied today.

I have long since lost count of how many times he used to say these two quotes to both his students and his grandchildren…

The first:

“The only reason for evil to exist… is for good people to do nothing.”

The second:

“We are doomed to repeat the atrocities of the past if you do not take the time to learn from them today.”

And ironically, it was these two quotes that I found myself thinking repeatedly about as I walked through one of the most horrific experiences of brutality and evil that I have witnessed in my entire life.

I’m ashamed to say that, previous to arriving in Cambodia, I had very little knowledge on its past or it’s culture. I had never heard about this country or it’s struggles in school. Somehow, it’s dark past had eluded the syllabus in all of my classes. It didn’t even warrant a chapter in my world history text book (which was in no way lacking in girth or weight).

So needless to say, I was in a paralytic shock when a fellow traveler first mentioned the atrocities that occurred in Cambodia not so long ago. Immediately, I knew it was my social responsibility to learn as much as I could of what happened here.

I attended the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (also known as S-21) in Phnom Penh with two friends on October 6, 2018.

One of which was a new friend named Julia. We had met her in Siem Reap and in true backpacker fashion, had continued our travels together onto Phnom Penh. The other friend just so happened to be one of my best friends in the entire world. After I had already been traveling for about 4 months, we decided this was too long of a time to go without seeing each other. So he booked a last minute flight to meet me in the next country on my itinerary... Cambodia.

It's important to mention here that I have always been extremely appreciative of his friendship and mentorship. However, it wasn't until we went through this museum together that I fully appreciated his ability to bring calmness and peace to me during my most emotional times. And this museum definitely brought out all kinds of emotions in me....

I began to feel the heaviness of this place as early as the tuk-tuk ride. As we drove along the cement wall lining the old high school towards the entrance of the museum, I took particular notice of the barbed wire and dilapidating state of the place. It was as if the earth was trying to retake these walls where horrors occurred back into the ground.

Upon arriving, we bought our tickets and paid a little extra for the audio guide. This proved to be beyond imperative to my mission to learn as much as possible. The audio guide took us on a horrific journey through the three main buildings of what used to be occupied by laughing, joyous, and carefree children and what quickly became a place filled of fear, brutality and death.

During the years of 1975-1979, the Cambodian head of state, Pol Pot, was responsible for the deaths of between one to two million innocent lives. His belief was to create a communist country that was self-sufficient from within and not reliant on external trade and negotiations. He attempted to create a “new society” by targeting all ethnic minorities living in Cambodia. These included Vietnamese, Muslims, Chinese, and many other residents. He also viciously targeted all the “intellectuals”, as they posed the largest threat to his end goal. Educators, lawyers, doctors…. All were diminished. Pol Pot’s emphatical “cleansing” didn’t end at just the prisoner deemed a menace to the regime… but also included murdering and wiping out entire lineages which included children, brothers, sisters, uncles, husbands, wives, and grandparents.

During the regime of the Khmer Rouge, S-21 was used as the largest prison in the country and was the location of the brutal interrogations conducted before prisoners were sent to the killing fields to meet their final fate. Of the 15,000 prisoners admitted to Tuol Sleng Prison only a mere 14 are known to have survived.

I pressed play on the first audio guide track at the entrance of the compound. I was given an overview of what to expect from this tour and an ominous warning that some of the things I would hear might be too hard to bear. The voice in my ear reassured me that I could go at my own pace and suggested that when the information got too heavy to handle, I could take a break and go into the central courtyard and listen from one of the many benches placed under the shade of the hauntingly beautiful trees that had been planted there.

Side note:

I found myself extremely appreciative of the warning I received from my own audio guide. So, although my writing isn’t as in depth as the guide I listened to, I still feel the need to throw out a forewarning at this point. My aim is to report what I learned on this day and what I learned was not easy to stomach nor to grasp my head around. If you do not wish to hear this information, then this is where you should stop reading. However, I urge you to power through and try not to live in unawareness because I can’t express enough how much knowledge is power.

We began our tour in the first building to the left of the courtyard. This was the building primarily used for interrogations. I begrudgingly forced my feet to shuffle me past the threshold of the doorway. The dark cast iron bed still laid in the middle of the room, it’s chipped edges and dented sections telling stories of questioning that had taken on a cruel and inhuman turn. The vicious shackles that maliciously kept it’s captives tied to this hell laid unassumingly across the bed. Next to which, also laid a simple yet threatening metal crow bar. It’s original use in this room, a thought I couldn’t bring myself to try to imagine.

I squeezed my eyes shut hard and bowed my head, trying to escape the vile images of what laid in front of me. However, the images I saw playing on the back of my eyelids were worse…. The imagination of atrocities may have happened on the very spot where I was standing was too much to bear.

I quickly snapped my eyes opened and found myself looking at the tiles directly underneath my sneakers. They were checkered yellow and white, but with what looked like a film of grime covering them. This didn’t seem like the kind of grime that you could get out with a mop and bucket however. This was heavier, more permanent. It was as if the immoral and criminal misdoings that occurred here had created an impermeable stain on the floor. As I glanced past my shoes and took in the entirety of the room, I realized that not only did this staining extend to the walls too, but there were also dark blotches of what I can only assume was blood that had pooled, stained, and soaked into the walls and floor as well.

I quickly forced my attention away from the dark marks and towards the enlarged photo on the wall. In all of these cells there were photographs mounted of what these rooms looked like when they were first discovered by two Vietnamese journalists after the liberation in 1979.

I found myself appreciating the grainy and cloudy quality of these photos because even with the poor visibility it was easily discernable how brutal the scenes were. When the journalists came across these rooms, the prisoner’s decomposing bodies still laid chained in their tortured positions… puddles of blood and flesh pooling underneath them.

These were the rooms where confessions were beaten out of you, regardless if they were true or not. Victims were forced to disclose family names and acquaintances before being shipped to the fields to be murdered. The list was then used to gather any remaining relatives that hadn’t been captured and they, too, were arrested and brought to S-21.

The prison itself was run by a man named Comrade Duch. His strategy was to employ children between the ages of 15 to 19 to be the staff, guards, and interrogators in the prison. They were easily manipulated and often too fearful to act in any other fashion then a strict reinforcement of his orders.

I exited the building and stoically made my way towards the second. I was already feeling the increasing pressure on my chest from the sorrow of what these people had gone through. I looked down at the ground and saw one of the fallen flowers nestled against my shoe. I knelt and picked it up. It was stunningly beautiful and fragrant, a harsh contrast to the stories and sites I was witnessing. I decided to hold on to it for the duration of my visit. A little piece of beauty to cling to and use when the vial in my throat began to surface from disgust.

As I continued my tour, I learned in depth about the living conditions, the methods of torture used, the way in which the regime documented all prisoners, and the personal stories from some of the unfortunate souls that found themselves detained here. Hundreds of black and white portraits of prisoners looked back at me with haunted eyes. I stared at one photo so long that I felt I knew her. I couldn’t look away. She was no different than me. Except within her eyes, she showed both defiance and submission to death. The picture began to swirl and blur. I took an unsteady step back and realized I had been holding my breath. These rooms were hot, sticky, and poorly ventilated. But I think it was more than that. I didn’t want to inhale the hopelessness that seemed to have seeped into the concrete walls here. I quickly escaped to the courtyard for a couple of long shallow breaths of fresh air. This was heavy. This was real. It was hard for me to believe that not only did this really happen, but it happened so recently, and even more astounding was that so many people have no idea of these atrocities. These were innocent people, that didn’t deserve this. How could this have happened?

Tears began prickling my eyes as the story of one prisoner by the name of Kerry Hamill flowed through my headphones and landed straight into my heart. Kerry was a 27-year-old man from New Zealand. He was fulfilling his lifelong dream of sailing the world with two other friends, John Dewhirst and Stuart Glass, when they decided to anchor at Koh Tang Island in order to avoid an oncoming storm. Unbeknownst to them, the brutal regime in Cambodia was in full swing and they had sailed into enemy waters. Their boat was captured and upon embarkment, Stuart Glass was instantly shot and killed. Terrified and confused, the two other men were then taken prisoner and transported to hell on earth, S-21.

John Dewhirst signed a confession after enduring three weeks of starvation, beatings, and brutal interrogations. Through the course of 2 months, Kerry was tortured over and over again in an attempt to coerce a confession of his affiliation with the CIA. After their confessions were made, both were murdered in cold blood.

The next voice that came through my headphones was that of Kerry’s brother, Rob Hamill. It is his speech at the war crimes tribunal, when he was finally able to address the man whose orders had killed not only his brother but thousands of others, Comrade Duch.

With a voice riddled with emotion, he tries to explain the hate he has in his heart for Duch and the effect of what his actions has had on himself and his family. He also explained that through the Khmer Rouge’s thorough documentation of all interrogations, he and his family were able to discern Kerry’s incredible resilience and his ability to keep his humor even in the darkest of times. Although Kerry didn’t know if these transcripts would ever be found by his family and loved ones, he decided to send secret messages of love and hope.

Here is an excerpt from Rob’s testimony:

“In his confession, Kerry stated that Colonel Sanders (of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, a popular chain of fast food restaurants) was one of his superiors.

He used our home telephone number as his CIA operative number and mentioned several family friends as supposed members of the CIA.

For instance, Colonel Perram was our father’s gliding instructor.

Captain Dodds is an old mate of Kerry’s who still lives in Whakatane.

He also mentions a Captain Pepper which may well have been a reference to the Beetle’s album and he talks about a Major Rouse. A ruse in English is a fraud or a confidence trick

Perhaps the most poignant comment in my brother’s confession was the mention of the public speaking instructor ‘ a Mr. S. Tarr’.

The instructor’s family name was spelt Tarr. Only the initial of the instructor’s first name S was given. S Tarr is in fact the name of my adoring mother Esther.

Esther Hamill. That’s my mother’s name

He was sending a message to our mother.

A message of love and hope. And it was as if, whatever the final outcome, he would have the last say. ”

I wipe at the tears now freely flowing down my cheeks. These men were the same age as me. They, too, were living out their dreams of travel and exploration. They just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. As a solo traveler, I couldn’t help but think of how easily this could have been me. Kerry’s family didn’t hear from him for 16 long months. They had no idea what had happened to him. They feared the worst but hoped for the best. Finally, after almost a year and a half of emotional torture, they heard the news that their Kerry had been captured, tortured, and murdered. Their last vestige of hope ripped ruthlessly away.

I couldn’t help but think at that moment of my mother and three siblings. Of how they would have felt in this situation. My younger brother, Michael, and only man in the family, trying to be strong for everyone else, yet silently aching inside. Perhaps struggling to navigate and communicate his emotions accurately. My youngest sister, Christina, fruitlessly trying to keep laughter in the house with her silly and hilarious jokes. Yet, the laughter never quite meeting her eyes anymore. My mother, with her normally unbreakable positive spirit and determination, feeling absolutely broken and utterly inconsolable. My older sister and best friend, Michelle, feeling an overwhelming and unnecessary sense of guilt. As if, somehow, she should have been with me. If not to have kept me from this fate altogether, then only to have been with me so that I didn’t have to suffer and die this way alone. All of these emotions and more would be how I would have felt if the roles were reversed. My heart instantly constricts with grief for the ordeal that Kerry and his family endured.

A collection of pictures of my family/my best friends.

I shakily lift the flower I had been holding for the last two hours to my nose, close my eyes, and deeply inhale. I will myself to stop crying and to finish this tour. This was important.

So, I unsteadily stand up and with heavy feet, numbly continued through the haunting buildings.

At the culmination of the tour, I sat on a bench contemplating everything I had learned that day. JP slowly approached and motioned for me to follow him. He led me to an older man that was sitting nearby.

He shook my hand and introduced himself as Norng Chan Phal. He then proceeded to explain that he was one of the few survivors of S-21. He and his brother were found by Vietnamese soldiers hiding underneath piles of clothes after the Khmer Rouge abandoned S-21 in 1979.

He pointed to a black and white photo that was taken on that liberation day of himself and several other children being carried by soldiers. They were naked in the photo and he explained that the clothes they were wearing smelt so bad that they were instructed to throw them out immediately. He informed us that his father, mother, and 7 other siblings were all murdered. Only himself (9 years old) and his younger brother survived. He explained how he remembered the last time he saw his mother alive, as she handed him the baby and told him to take care of them. With a stoic tone, he said that when the Vietnamese soldiers found them, he handed over the baby to them only to be told in return that he was already dead. Norng said that he wrote a book about his story and now comes back here to inform people of what happened. Its title is “Norng Chan Phal: The mystery of the boy at S-21”. I purchased a book, attempted to apologize for his suffering, and thanked him for being there.

I little ways up the path we came across another survivor who had returned to this haunting place to tell his story. Chum Mey is the author of a book called “survivor” that depicts in vivid detail his harrowing journey through s-21. I listened to him speak and subsequently purchased his book. It was yet another reminder at how recent and tragic this genocide was. I carefully placed the white flower I had consciously carried throughout the entire tour onto the first page of the book and closed it. I wanted to have a piece of this place with me. Also, I hoped that when I passed these books onto the members of my book club to read, that they too, might find solace in this preserved yet beautiful flower if they so needed.

Walking away from this experience I feel changed. At the end of the audio guide, the narrator stated that it is now our duty, after learning what happened here, to pass on the knowledge to others. This reminded me of the final part of Rob’s testimony at the tribunal court hearing.

He wrote:

“I have had to sit down and write about what you did to good people and the pain that you caused. When the need and desire arises, I can be incredibly focused. I’m tough. I’m determined. If anything, anything at all, is to come from this trial and from my statement on behalf of those I love….

1) let it be that the world takes notice of the evil that can happen when people do nothing,

2) let it be that world decides that doing nothing is not an option.”

And I vowed that I, too, would sit down and write about this experience…. Even if I could never do justice to the true history and pain that occurred here…. At the very least, maybe I could try to bring awareness, to those who don’t know, in an attempt to make sure that these atrocities never happen again.

It is our obligation to inform.