I promised to blog this trip extra candidly, so I hope y’all are ready for it here…

Fair warning.

Alright! So, I planned this trip to Cambodia in the loosest of terms. I had originally planned to be here, in Vietnam, and in Laos during my trip in 2015, but my medevac disallowed THAT from happening. Fast forward to this year — I essentially planned nothing except my flights and my first 2 nights of hotel before I arrived.

With that in mind, I very selfishly had extremely limited context and insight into Cambodia’s history. Yeah, I’d heard of the Khmer Rouge and I knew there had been a terrible genocide at some point, but that’s about it.

While I was on my layover in SK, I booked a city tour for my first day; it’s pretty standard when I get somewhere new, I like to get the lay of the land.

I. Was. Not. Ready.

Our guide picked us up and said we were heading to “the museum” first. Ok, sweet, I love museums!

Then we arrived at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Memorial Museum.

Yep. That’s how I started out this trip. The fucking Genocide museum. Frankly though, I’m really glad I did because it gives an incredible amount of context to just about everything in Cambodia today.

Let me spit three facts for you that I LEARNED at this museum and on day 1 in Phnom Penh:

1. This genocide? It started in 1975 and ran through 1979.
2. 2.5 million Cambodians were killed. Only, yanno, 24% of the population of Cambodia at the time.
3. Pol Pot (the CAMBODIAN who did this to his own people) survived and lived until his 70s.

We never really talk about this genocide though. I would have noticed, since as a Jewish person, genocide kind of freaks me out. It seems like since the Vietnam War had just ended, no one really gave a fuck about Cambodia or the people who were being systematically murdered. Straight out just crushed. Here are some of Pol Pot/the Khmer Rouge’s philosophies:

1. You must pull out the weed by its roots. Aka, if someone is accused of a crime, you must murder their whole family so no one can seek revenge. (Yes, even babies. I’ll get to that…)
2. It’s better to kill someone innocent instead of not killing a criminal. Aka if someone is accused, just kill them.

Toul Sleng is housed in an old high school…. which had been re-purposed by the Khmer Rouge into S-21, a ruthless secret prison where Cambodians were brought when accused, “confessions” were tortured out of them, and then they were sent to a “Killing Field” where they were murdered upon arrival at the edge of a pit with a farming tool. Why at the edge of the pit? So they could fall into the mass grave and later have some dirt thrown on them. Why a farming tool? Twofold reason: It was quiet AND bullets were expensive.

We traveled to one of the killing fields after the museum, where we paid respects to the thousands that were killed there. And this is where I saw the mass grave of women and babies. And the tree next to it.

After the war ended and this particular field was found, this tree was discovered covered in blood and hair and bone fragments and brains.

You read that right.

These motherfuckers took babies by their little legs and swung them at a TREE and smashed them to death. And then flung their bodies into a dirt pit, probably where their mothers were, with not a single fucking care.

I know.

Take a minute.

That was a lot.

But seriously, that’s barely a FRACTION of what the Cambodian people went through– did you know that the Khmer Rouge also outlawed (private) property and currency? People were reduced to government slaves, and if there was even a hint that you might not support it, or that you might be educated enough to eventually not like it, you were brutally murdered. Oh, P.S. this applied to the Cambodian royal family too – the Khmer Rouge imprisoned the King and his father but murdered the entire rest of his family.

All of this only ended when Vietnam invaded and overthrew Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Because, yanno, no one else gave a shit.

I get it, everyone was tired. They’d just been in wars. Lost young men and resources. I’m not here to nitpick the past… but what I do want to say is that we can’t continue to be surprised that people are horrible to each other. If you have an ounce of privilege in you, you need to stop letting your brother, your mom, your granddad, your boss, your partner, that guy on the street harassing the person in a niquab, the woman screaming “JUST LEARN ENGLISH!” at a young family in the store, be terrible to other people. Because if you don’t, you don’t have the right to be disgusted by anything I educated you about in this post. You don’t get to say Never Again. Because you’re part of the problem.