The Killing Fields

Jan 12, 2010

Today we are in Phnom Penh, ground zero of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. We made a visit to the National Genocide Museum and then traveled out to one of the many “killing fields” scattered about the country. It’s pretty grim.

Our guide for the day was a gentleman in his forties who had been through the war as a young teen; he lost his father and two sisters in the war. Our first stop was the museum which is essentially the preserved remains of what had been one of the prisons of the time. In its original life it had been a school. Under the Khmer Rouge it became a place of torture and death. Individual school rooms had been partitioned with stone walls into cells that were no bigger than 2x6 feet, and that is where people were kept, manacled to the wall, in between torture sessions.

The torture sessions were horrific, as I suppose all torture is. But it was also so pointless. Some people will argue that torture is justified if you are trying to extract vital information from a prisoner. But these people were just caught up in the paranoia of the time. Pol Pot was insane with paranoia and thought everyone was plotting to kill him so everyone had to die, but not before confessing to being a spy. There were precautions at the prison to prevent people from committing suicide and the threat that if you did kill yourself, the reprisal would be the killing of your entire family. It must have seemed like the world had gone mad.

Jan 16, 2010

You know, this experience and topic is just so hard that I’ve had difficulty sitting down to finish writing about it. The details are so gruesome and a profound sadness seems to permeate the air. I could still weep just thinking about it. The real shame is that we have visited too many of these killing fields… in Dachau and in Guatemala and in Haiti. You wonder how anyone who has been through such horrors can ever believe in God again. And some don’t. They lose all faith and live the remainder of their lives in bitterness and hatred. But so many come out of the ordeal with gratitude to God for their survival. I suppose that’s what it means to have faith. It’s when you are in your darkest hour that you most deeply need to believe that there is something good in the world and that there is some meaning or at least redemption in all the suffering.

One Sunday our priest told us something his Protestant Minister friend told him. What she said was this… “You Catholics say that God never gives us anything we can’t handle. Well that’s just Catholic hogwash. God ALWAYS gives us more than we can handle. That’s why we need God.” I liked that approach because I’ve known too many people who have been broken by their suffering and to say that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle seems to imply that if you crack, you don’t have faith. On the other hand, the alternate ending seems to imply that God visits these things upon us and I don’t believe that either. I cannot believe in a God that would deliberately inflict genocide on a people “to teach them” something. There is no lesson there valuable enough to make up for the loss.

And so I have to live with the mystery of it. To accept that as human beings we are all capable of great evil, but that we are also capable of great good. And that’s where we find God, I think. In the small acts of courage and humanity – someone sharing the last of their food or hiding someone under risk of death or even more amazing, the ability of some to forgive and to move on with their lives. To know that, no matter how dire the circumstances, life finds a way.