This was a pretty heavy day.
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| Human teeth on the ground |
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| Skulls in the stupa |
S-21 was by far the most emotional of the two places. The Killing Fields had all the original building destroyed after the Kymer Rouge were removed from power, so the audio tour just takes you around the sites where they once stood.
But S-21 has everything preserved as it was when the prison was liberated. Including the blood stains on the floor.
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| One of the rooms in S-21 where prisoners were chained to the bed and tortured |
Tuol Sleng Prison was found by the stench of the rotting corpses. Many of the rooms have photographs of the victims who were discovered in them.
The whole place is incredibly gruesome and macabre. More so because it was originally a school.
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| A blackboard in one of the classrooms |
The part that hit me the hardest was on the outside of the three level classrooms. They had barbed wire blocking off the balconies so that the captives couldn’t commit suicide by jumping to their death on the courtyard below. That one detail just hammered home how unimaginably horrific and terrifying it would have been to be there. Even the most basic right to choose when to die was taken away from them.
I have never been more happy to leave a place.
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