Cambodia (Part III.) The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

One of the best classes I’ve ever taken in college was a course in Holocaust-related film and literature. I spent a good chunk of my past summer reading Iris Chang’s “The Rape of Nanking.” And one of the most memorable places I’ve visited so far in Southeast Asia are the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and the killing fields right outside the capital city.

I don’t think it’s so much that I enjoy learning about these subjects. Maybe it’s more akin to a grotesque voyeurism that comes from watching the aftermath of a car accident amplified by a tenfold. Maybe it’s because no matter how much you learn about it or read about it, there is always this huge unanswerable question looming over the historical facts, and no matter how close you reach the edges of the black hole existing in every human being, the very depths of it can never be truly comprehended or rationalized.

Someone needs to take care of the dead. It’s in our civilized desire to make sure that the people who pass away are properly buried or cremated. Even for those who don’t necessarily believe in an afterlife, there’s a certain innate idea that the human dead should be taken care of, not disposed in the streets like animals or garbage. We all hope that when the time comes for us to die, that our loved ones will take care of us even if we won’t experience it ourselves.

Over two million people died under Pol Pot’s regime, and someone needs to take care of the dead. Someone needs to make sure that the photographs of the nameless victims are on display, that the skulls have open air to breathe and that the museum is there for anybody who wants to learn. I wonder if the tour guides and people who run the Tuol Sleng Genocide museum ever wish they were doing something else. Or if they are so used to reciting the same grisly historical data day in and day out that they have become desensitized to it. Maybe they have simply accepted that taking care of the dead is their everyday job.