The hotel provided a "tuk tuk" driver to take us to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, which is 15 km outside of Phnom Penh.
Between 1975 and 1978 about 17,000 men, women, children, and infants who had been detained and tortured at s-21 were transported to the extermination campt of Choeung ek. They were often bludgeone to death to avoid wasting precious bullets.
A memorial stupa was constructed in 1988 to house the remains of 8985 people who had been exhumed from the one time longan orchard.
Remains are placed on seventeen stories of shelves within the structure, divided by gender and age. It is a peaceful place today. We hired a guide to take us around and explain what is really almost unfathomable.
You took your shoes off to enter the stupa where the remains are housed.
Leg irons were used to detain the prisoners until they were killed.
Bits of clothing and fragments of bone were visible everywhere, as much of the graves have been left undistrubed. More relics appear when it rains.
This is the "killing tree" against which infants were flung head first.
Some of the exhumed graves.
Our guide explains how the sharp edge of this tree limb was used as a blade to kill the prisoners.
The stupa is built to remember the horrors of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime and the torment that was senselessly inflicted upon the people by Democratic Kampuchea.
In contrast the path to the Killing Fields is peaceful farm land.
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