Story and Photos by Leah Olson
“MASS GRAVE OF 166 VICTIMS WITHOUT HEADS,” reads a painted sign next to a large crater in the grassy field. I stare into the muddy pit. One hundred and sixty-six. I play with the number in my head. How much space do 166 bodies take up? One hundred and sixty-six seems like a big number, but I’m finding it difficult to imagine. I move my toes around the ledge of the pit, curl my fingers, fill my lungs with air, feeling the space one body takes up. I try to imagine me, multiplied by 166. After five minutes on the edge of the mass grave, I give up trying to conceptualize that number of bodies and continue walking.
Before I arrived at the Killing Fields on that humid Cambodian afternoon, the day started like most in Phnom Penh. I woke up, bathed in my hostel’s miniature shower stall and headed to one of the city’s riverfront cafes for a cup of black-as-tar coffee with a dollop of condensed milk in the bottom. The caffeine slowly floated to my head as I flipped through my Lonely Planet guidebook, contemplating what to do and what to see for the remainder of the day. The commonplace morning activities gave no foreboding to the dark revelation I would make that afternoon, standing in a field where thousands of people had been slaughtered by the tyrannical Khmer Rouge regime. In just a few hours, as I held a human tooth in my hand – a molar that had fallen out of a skull in the late 1970s – I would for the first time understand the meaning and the magnitude of genocide.
After I finish breakfast, I decide it would be a good day to hire a moto driver (a moto is Cambodia‘s equivalent to a taxi) to take me to see the Killing Fields, also known as Cheong Ek. Over the past weeks, I voraciously read all the accounts I could find of the Khmer Rouge regime and genocide that lasted from 1975-1979. I’d read political biographies of Pol Pot, a story of a French scholar who was imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge, and an autobiography written by a young woman named Loung Ung who had survived the horrors but watched many of her family members die in the process. Each book left a lasting impression, but the information and stories of torture, forced labor camps, starvation, social engineering, and ethnic cleansing remained at a comfortable distance. The Khmer Rouge genocide was obviously massive – reports range from 1.7 million to 2.4 million killed by the group. But despite my research, the enormity of what happened in Cambodia remained abstract.
After a bouncy and thrilling one-hour ride out of Phnom Penh’s city center, the moto driver drops me at the entrance to the Killing Fields. Many of those killed by the Khmer Rouge were brought to these fields from the nearby Tuol Sleng prison (a converted school house) to be slaughtered. The first thing that meets my gaze upon arrival is a towering monument full of cracked and weathered skulls: the remains of Cambodians murdered at this exact location. As I begin my tour of the fields, I’m hyper-aware of my feet methodically crunching the gravel trails that wind through the mass graves. Men, women, and children were shot, beaten, bludgeoned, buried alive, and hit against trees here in an effort to “cleanse” Cambodian society of ethnic minorities, the educated, and anyone affiliated with the Cambodian or foreign governments. The place is eerily silent and even though I feel a faint breeze, neither the trees nor the grass seem to rustle. No birds chirp. No frogs croak. It’s just the crunch of my boots, of my living body, moving through these green fields that still feel slimy with death.
I stop and stare at a small altar, on top of which are bits of bones that were found after the main memorial of skulls was constructed. They are forgotten bits and pieces of people. A broken shard of a jaw, a fragment of tibia, a few crumbling ribs. Near the altar, half-buried in the ground is a tooth – a molar. After years buried in one of the graves, it is now coffee brown. I stare at it for five minutes, clenching my own teeth together and feeling my jaw muscles tighten. The wind gusts and still nothing seems to rustle. I prod the tooth loose from the dirt with the toe of my boot and then stare at it a bit more, unblinking. My right hand, which seems to have a mind of its own, picks the molar up. I hold it in my palm and stare as though I’ve never seen a human tooth before. I run my fingers over the curves and canyons on the top of the tooth and feel the jagged and pointy root on the underside. I twirl it in my fingers and feel the weight of it in my hand. Although it’s just a molar, it feels enormously heavy.
This tooth was, at one time, attached to a jaw with other teeth, which was attached to a skull, attached to a head, attached to a body. But most of all, this tooth was attached to a life that was cut short by the Khmer Rouge. I try to comprehend what this means. Was the person male or female? Young or old? How many meals were chewed by this tooth? What was the favorite food of the tooth’s person? Did he or she like Cambodian curry noodles and amok fish or prefer bamboo sticky rice and salted pork? Did this previous life have a favorite coffee stall on the streets of Phnom Penh? If the person was an adult, he or she was most likely educated, as the Khmer Rouge targeted educated professionals, among many others, because they were seen as a threat to the regime’s doctrine. Where did this person go to school and what did they study? What was their favorite book?
I ponder these questions while feeling the molar’s weight and all of a sudden, I have a better idea of how much 166 is. There were 166 molars just like this one, plus the other 31 teeth most adults have, for a total of 5,312 teeth in this particular grave. There are dozens of questions to ask about each tooth, each life. From this forgotten piece of a human being, I start to understand the magnitude of 166 people. But there weren’t 166 people killed in the Khmer Rouge genocide – there were millions. I try to think of two million teeth like this one. The number is so large, I don’t know how to visualize it. Two million molars. Two million favorite foods. Two million personalities and two million families.
I place the tooth on the altar with the other pieces of bones and walk away feeling solemn and heavy, leaving with a silent nod of remembrance to the tooth and skeletal scraps that didn’t make it into the main memorial. This molar gave me something that no book or statistic had: it allowed me to conceptualize the death of one person and then 166 people, which gave me a better idea of two million.
A single brown molar made me understand more about life, death, murder, and genocide than the miles of news bulletins I had read about other genocides and mass killings in places like Rwanda and Darfur. “One million dead.” “Reports of 100,000 murdered.” “Ethnic cleansing.” The numbers were large, but they never truly soaked in. It’s still difficult to conceptualize how many one million or two million people are, but now I’ve held in my hand the meaning of one. For me, understanding one death perhaps bears more weight and meaning than an abstract number like two million ever could.
To read more about Leah’s adventures abroad, check out her blog or follow her on Twitter. Interested in another student’s perspective on the Killing Fields? Take a look at Alison Moran’s The Lost Pearl of Cambodia.
