The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

Today I took the opportunity to visit two sites of great importance to Cambodia's grim and brutal history, the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
Tuol Sleng, formerly know as security office 21, or S-21, was created under the orders of Pol Pot and designed for the detention, interrogation, inhumane torture, and killing after confessions of the detainees were received and documented. S-21, formerly Toul Svay Prey high school in which the classrooms were turned into small cells, was created on April 17, 1975 after the forced evacuation of the entire city of Phnom Penh - at this time a population of about 3 million. Between 1975 and 1978, more than 17,000 people were imprisoned, tortured, and later taken to the killing fields of Choeung Ek. The Khmer Rouge leaders kept meticulous records and each prisoner was photographed. These photographs are displayed in room after room of the prisons walls, and serve as a very important reminder of the atrocities faced by the people of Kampuchea.
As I arrived at Choeung Ek, an ominous thunderstorm loomed in the distance providing an erie backdrop to the already somber experience of walking amongst 86 communal mass graves, now large pits in the ground. 43 others remain untouched. It was strangely peaceful walking around the well kept grounds and hard to imagine that such horrors took place at this very spot. Although, it was a bit discomforting knowing that the remains of thousands of victims still lie in the pits I was walking among, as only the skulls were removed when the mass graves were exhumed in 1980. These skulls, more than 8,000 of them, are on display behind the glass enclosure inside the Memorial Stupa, built in 1988. Many of these skulls belong to the faces in the pictures on display in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.