But that first time, I was still left numb even though I had read about Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek before visiting, and so knew what to expect. Archivists are sorting through the documents that the security apparatus maintained at S-21, which include the photographs taken of all the inmates on their entry, and other photographs taken of some after death. Many of those black-and-white photographs are arranged in display cases in neat geometrical rows that resemble the layout of photos in American high school yearbooks, except that almost none of these prisoners are smiling, and none are named. A visitor cannot help but look at these faces with knowledge of their doom, and many of those photographed probably had a sense of what was to come. Foreboding thickens the air, but at least the museum is mercifully quiet, most of the time. The tourists speak in low, sometimes nervous voices, for what should one say, exactly, as one walks through interrogation rooms where shackles and bloodstains remain, preserved as visceral proof of the tortures inflicted on so many by teenage guards, some of whom were also fated to have their photograph taken.
And what does one say if one confronts an actual survivor of the prison. Chum Mey emerged from a room in one of the wings and looked exactly as he did in Rithy Panh’s disturbing documentary S-21, where Mey and the painter Vann Nath, another survivor, returned to the high school that had been turned into a prison. Under the punishing gaze of Panh’s camera, Nath confronted several of the prison guards in a dialogue about what they did and who bore responsibility, but Mey was too overcome with emotion to participate. His family died here, and he survived by mere chance. What the scholar Khatharya Um says is true: “The feeling conveyed by survivors is one of living with ‘one body, two lives’—one before, and one after Pol Pot.”4 He wore a short-sleeved red shirt and gray slacks in the film, the same ones he wore when I saw him. His white hair was trimmed short in the same manner. He took me to a narrow brick cell like the one where he had been imprisoned and reenacted how he was shackled and made to use a rusty American ammunition box for a latrine. As my interpreter translated, he described the torture done to him, and he wept as I saw him weep in the film and in the testimony that he offered at the trial of the prison commandant, Duch. Does he weep every time he tells his story to someone like me? I cannot remember now whether I asked for a picture, or whether he offered, but we stood side by side and he embraced my sweaty back with his arm and pulled me tightly to him. I think I smiled — it is not a photograph I care to look at again — because that is what one is supposed to do.
My interpreter drove me on her motorbike to Choeung Ek, where the S-21 guards took prisoners at night, by truck. As one enters the park-like grounds with its green lawns, a majestic stupa is the focal point. Drawing closer to the stupa, one sees behind its glass windows racks and racks of bones and skulls. The empty sockets return one’s gaze. These remains serve as both the guardians of this site and its prisoners. If there are ghosts, are they angry that so many strangers trespass on the place of their demise, or are they pleased to be remembered? As for the green lawns, which dip and swell gently, handwritten signs indicate the locations of mass graves, point to the tree where the killers bashed the heads of babies, and inform visitors that bones still emerge from the soil after it rains. Thousands died here, clubbed over the head as they knelt before the open graves, the sounds masked by the hum of a generator. This was not a place I would ever visit at night, without lights. I prefer to take my photos during daylight, as does the monk in the saffron robe who stands at the edge of a swell, framing the scene in his digital camera. The heat is oppressive. When I return to my hotel, the first thing I do is shower. Then I lay down and the numbness seeped down deep into my mind and body.
I had visited the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich, and while it was a solemn experience, I had not felt as immobilized, exhausted, and shocked, emotionally and physically, as I did in my boutique Phnom Penh hotel. Was it because this history seemed closer to me, in time, in history and in culture? Or was it because by the time I visited Dachau in 1998 the veil of memorialization had already been lowered? The horrors of that place could no longer be seen so immediately, but were instead filtered through a gauze created by the erasure of the visceral, through years of exposure to other people’s memories of the Holocaust and its transformation into a mnemonic relic, like Christ’s body hanging on a cross in every Catholic church, bloody but remote. It was not that historical detail was absent in Dachau. The degree of detail, and its polish, was much more evident there than at either Tuol Sleng or Choeung Ek. The Germans had processed their history over decades, and with the resources of a wealthy country had built the finest of memorials and museums dedicated to the Holocaust, attuned to Western standards of aesthetics that had become universal by dint of Western power. The archives of photos, from the victims in happier days to the victims in their skeletal phase, were rich in extent, presentation, and captioning. Victims’ mementoes, from personal belongings and clothing to even things like locks of hair, were artfully exhibited. The grounds of the concentration camps were manicured, belying the corpses that were once strewn there. This is the work of memory conducted from the higher ground, erected with the power of industrial memory. This work calls for sobriety, contemplation, reflection, for respect and reverence for the dead. It urges us to further our resolve never to allow this atrocity to be forgotten or repeated. But what I also took away from my visits to Germany’s memorial network was how horror can be framed in beautiful ways. For many of us, even horror must be rendered artfully, lest one disrespect the dead or discomfort the living.
What I saw in Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek; in the killing caves of Battambang; in the small stupas full of skulls and bones that rose here and there on the Cambodian landscape; in the unlit cavern of Tham Phiu in Laos; in the homes near the Plain of Jars that used the casings of American bombs and shells for décor; in the neglected village cemeteries of martyrs and unknown soldiers throughout Vietnam; in the 2003 iteration of Saigon’s War Remnants Museum housed in a handful of small buildings and which featured the bottled, deformed fetuses of Agent Orange victims — what I saw was far from beautiful. I saw the poverty of memory found in poor countries, in small places. The typical signs of wealthy memory were absent. There were no vast expanses of marble and granite, no imposing sheets of glass, no precision-cut etchings, no grammatically perfect captions and commentaries in any language. Absent were extensive historical documentation, perfectly shaded lighting, a modulated ambiance of sound, sight, smell, and temperature cossetting one’s body and senses. Also missing were fellow well-trained visitors who had already been socialized, like returning churchgoers, into the customs and rituals of silent mnemonic worship. In poor countries, these characteristics of wealthy memory are reversed. As a curator at the Documentation Center of Cambodia told me, referring to the state of affairs at Tuol Sleng and future plans for its renovation, “It could be more beautiful.”