As a college student who is a former victim of advanced-stage teen angst and spent his formative years under the Bush administration, I like to think I am jaded. To everything. That's right, every last thing.
It was for this reason that I signed up for a 3-day, 2-night field trip from Ho Chi Minh City to Cambodia to tour the killing fields and Angkor Wat. Don't get me wrong: I've seen endless amounts of really fascinating and memorable stuff during the past two months, but nothing that really stuck with me. I'm talking about the kind of sights, sounds and smells that embed themselves in your mind for years and sometimes never leave, haunting you forever. I wanted, nay, needed, some of that.
Masochistic? Yeah, probably.
On the morning of April 10 (the day I was slated to sign up for classes -- thanks, ISIS!) we were taken by bus to Tuol Sleng -- S-21, a former Phnom Penh high school converted to a Khmer Rouge prison and torture site during the 1975-1979 genocide, which aimed to bleach all forms of Western and intellectual influence out of the Cambodian national fabric. This was the intensity I was inexplicably searching for -- a true horror of the outside world that I knew existed but had to see and feel to really understand.
We walked from former classroom to former classroom, converted into chambers of unimaginable pain that are forever marred by bloodstains and bullet holes. The final room of the exhibit, as it was, consisted of a series of two larger rooms covered wall-to-wall with individual photographs of prisoners, taken as they entered the prison complex.
You can imagine how incredibly difficult it may be to look into the faces of these people, now 30 years dead. We know what will happen to them, as do they. Gazing into their eyes, one literally can feel the dawning apprehension of the horrible actions that they know will be taken against their bodies and minds until their "confession" of opposition to the people and state earns them the release of death in a nearby killing field.
But of the thousands of photographs, there were a certain six of them, all of men, that made me stop, scratch my head and think long and hard about what was going on. These six men were clearly smiling. Some were smirking and one just had a big grin across his face, but all of them were relaxed and not outwardly terrified and distressed like their fellow prisoners. And I wondered, "How? And why?"
There are, of course, the rational explanations: They somehow didn't know what was going on, either through general ignorance of the situation or some sort of disability. It may have also been a momentary facial spasm, a sneeze or something of the like at the moment the picture was taken.
Perhaps it's the hopeless romantic in me, though, that says that these were something more, that they were final, hopeless gestures of defiance in the face of blood-curdling torture and the prospect of a pointless death. After all, be idealistic as you want, but every victim of a mass killing will not be remembered.
This is, necessarily, purely conjecture, but how much strength does it take to muster a grin knowing what's about to happen and how you will get there? I have no idea, but looking into the eyes of these six individuals, I see something I can't at all explain or understand -- something I have never seen in a human expression before and hope I will never again will. It's tragedy at its worst, but is it humanity at its best, too?
I will probably never know the names of these six gentlemen, nor even begin to imagine what they went through up to the end, nor the names of their fellow sufferers, martyrs, whatever you'd like to call them. Yet I am grateful -- they not only gave me what I went to Cambodia searching for, but also -- in a way I can't start to explain -- just a bit of renewed hope in humanity.
The most I can do for them, knowing as little as I do, is ask, if you ever happen to be in Phnom Penh visiting prison S-21, watch for these six individuals. If you keep your eyes open, they're not so difficult to miss. Hopefully they'll make you think as much as they made me.
Erik's column runs whenever it washes up in a bottle.
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