A Survivor’s Return to the Killing Fields | Toul Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Pehn, Cambodia
May 26, 2009 by Althea Tan
Filed under Cambodia, Family, Travel
It’s still beyond me that my loving husband had gone through five horrifying years of the Killing Fields when he was just a kid… and survived it all. Imagine a 7-year-old boy in a remote village in Cambodia with nothing but a piece of tattered shirt — replaced only once every 12 months— to cover his emaciated body and nothing at all to protect his already-calloused feet. He was a buffalo boy who greeted mornings with grumbling noises in his stomach and delighted at the sight of snails and snakes, which he often referred to as his “perfect protein-rich meal”.
He had no concept of a normal childhood but perhaps seeing villagers tortured and hacked-to-death seemed pretty normal to him, as he knew nothing else other than that (maybe except ebbing memories of his privileged pre-war life, but he must have forgotten by then).
