For one child of survivors, Cambodian killings resemble Shoah

[Supharidh Hy]

Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA)
April 16, 2006

FIRST PERSON
For one child of survivors, Cambodian killings resemble Shoah
By Tibor Krausz

BANGKOK, April 16 (JTA) — As someone who lost practically his
entire family to the Holocaust, I came to regard the Holocaust as the
ultimate benchmark for mass murder. Any subsequent 20th-century genocides
seemed merely sad reminders that the post-Holocaust pledge “Never again”
was
just an empty promise.

Tuol Sleng is Cambodia’s version of Auschwitz. I found seeing
Tuol Seng not only a harrowing experience but an eye-opener of the
similarities between the two killings.

Outside Tuol Sleng, or “Poison Tree Hill,” ragged little
children chase a football while a small girl savors a vanilla ice cream.
Like over half of Cambodians, they were born after the Khmer Rouge genocide
and probably don’t know why this former school has been turned into a
museum.

The three-story, horseshoe-shaped building with open-air
corridors resembles any high school in Southeast Asia. Once it was anything
but. Here, even courtyard trees take on sinister connotations: Perhaps
people were spread-eagled to branches and flayed alive.

Now Tuol Sleng is painfully personalizing this formerly abstract
tragedy. A former Khmer Rouge prison, the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal
Crimes was once known as Prison S-21.

In a room left as Vietnamese troops found it in 1979 after
driving Pol Pot and his thugs back into the jungles, stains still blacken
the walls around a metal bed hooked up to electric prods under a large
photograph of a burnt victim, the last to die here after no doubt
“confessing” to being an “imperialist stooge” recruited by the CIA to
undermine Cambodia’s new people’s paradise. Rule No. 6 of the Security
Regulations displayed at the door declares: “While getting lashes or
electrification you must not cry at all.”

While their end results were similar, the Holocaust and Cambodia’s
Killing Fields were motivated by different ideologies. One was the
industrialized, systematic mass murder of a people purely for ethnic
reasons
with a concomitant attempt to erase an entire, millennia-old religious
culture from the face of the earth; the other saw millions of helpless
Cambodians clobbered and starved to death fairly randomly by their
indoctrinated compatriots who often came from the same village, by virtue
of
being “enemies of the revolution.”

Yet the Holocaust and the Killing Fields had this much in
common: Not only did both the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge genocide
obliterate the lives of the murdered, but they have also irretrievably
destroyed civilizations.

The Nazis’ mass murder of Jews is singular among modern
genocides in that beyond exterminating 6 million Jews with industrial
efficiency, it destroyed a distinct civilization in the process — that of
Eastern European Jewry.

Cambodia’s own holocaust came close. With a back-to-basics
agrarian utopia in mind, Pol Pot set about eliminating all traces of
culture
and urbanity from Khmer society. Monks, teachers, doctors, lawyers and
intellectuals — anyone with spectacles qualified — were butchered, in a
civilization that produced the renowned Angkor Wat temple complex dating
from the Middle Ages. It was no accident that the school of Toul Sleng was
turned into the regime’s most notorious slaughterhouse.

Covering the walls in two ground-floor rooms are snapshots. With
Gestapo-like efficiency, Khmer Rouge guards took pictures of their victims,
men, women, even children — often whole “enemy” families. Most stare back
frightened, many dumbstruck, some resigned, a few defiant. The photos’
original purpose was to humiliate. Yet with their help the victims,
individually and collectively, have defied their murderers: Although they
went to their death nameless, they haven’t remained faceless.

Past classrooms were turned into torture chambers honeycombed
with makeshift brick coops containing iron shackles. A gruesome gallery of
oil paintings provides an eyewitness account of how inmates met their ends.
Left behind by Vann Nath, one of seven survivors out of some 16,000
prisoners, the paintings’ childish perspectives make them all the more
poignant.

Vann Nath has done for the Killing Fields what Art Spiegelman,
in his comic book “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,” has done for the Holocaust:
show horror through the eyes of an innocent. In one painting, guards in the
Khmer Rouge’s trademark black pajamas and checkered scarves wrench the
fingernails of their captive with pliers; in another, they cudgel a man to
death with bamboo sticks; in a third, they dip a prisoner headfirst into an
oil drum of acid.

Mounted on a wall in another room is a large map of Cambodia
fashioned from human skulls and dissected diagonally by a stylized Mekong
painted blood red. Nothing could better encapsulate the Killing Fields.
Between 1975 and 1979 — or Year Zero to Year Four in their reckoning — Pol
Pot, or Brother No. 1, and his illiterate peasant boys transformed the
country into a countrywide death chamber.

He who kills one soul kills an entire world, Judaism stresses.
Khmer Rouge executioners did their work well. They killed some 1.7 million
Cambodians, or nearly a quarter of the population. It was a national
disaster that approached the Holocaust in its quantitative magnitude.

Though Pol Pot died in 1998, his bloody handprints continue to
bedevil Cambodia, in its enduring poverty and lawlessness. Outside the
museum, maimed beggars plead for loose change. While several Khmer Rouge
stalwarts laze about in retirement in baronial mansions, landmines
littering
the countryside continue to claim daily victims from among the downtrodden.

Yet life goes on. A comparatively upscale neighborhood
encroaches on the museum’s barbed-wire perimeters. A guesthouse has
sprouted
opposite the museum’s gate.

The Cambodian government occasionally pledges to bring Khmer
Rouge leaders to trial, but it seems doubtful that the Cambodians’
aggressors will be brought to justice.

Nonetheless, survivors and relatives can exact their own measure
of justice through remembrance of the victims and appropriate public
testimonials. Perhaps that’s why Cambodian scholars and nonprofits have
turned to Yad Vashem and Holocaust museums in the United States for
inspiration in creating their own memorials. Sadly, the Cambodian memorial
project remains perennially bedeviled by severe cash restraints.

That said, in one of the world’s poorest countries, any funds
collected for a fitting museum could be much better spent on improving the
lives of Cambodians. The Khmer Rouge, like the Nazis before them, may have
killed the past and blighted the present for millions of innocents, but
Cambodian survivors, like Jews now prospering again, must be allowed to
reclaim the future.[End]