Not many things come to mind when thinking about the country of Cambodia, but the country is known for two things: the incredible Angkor Wat, the massive temple complex discovered not so long ago in the jungle, and the horrific genocide under the rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

I need to experience both to get to know this country. Angkor Wat will come later, when I fly to Siem Reap. Today I’m visiting the nearby “Killing Fields” – former rice paddies that were a major scene of Khmer Rouge crimes.

In a rented minibus, accompanied by our guide, Mo, we drive to a school that Pol Pot converted into a concentration camp during his reign. From the outside, the building still resembles a school, and wildflowers and orchids grow in the courtyard. However, a wall surrounds the building. Everything is surrounded by barbed wire. The guide leads us through the individual rooms, classrooms, converted into prison cells, with only a single steel bunk in the middle of the room. Next to the bunks are small tin cans, the prisoners’ toilets, which were emptied every two weeks.

The “Political Potential,” abbreviated to Pol Pot, was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, a communist army that fought and expelled the last remaining French forces in Cambodia after the collapse of the French colonial empire in 1973. They were thus celebrated as liberators. Pol Pot marched into Phnom Penh and told the people they had to leave the city within three days because there were still “internal enemies” to fight. Anyone who didn’t escape in time was shot.

Pol Pot’s reign of terror began. He aimed to turn Cambodia into a collective peasant and worker state and persecuted intellectuals and foreigners. They were abducted or killed, while people who had attended school or received any other education were mercilessly hunted down, tortured, and sent to concentration camps or to the “rice fields,” also known as the “killing fields.” The families of those who had attended school were also executed. No distinction was made between men, women, children, or the elderly. In total, a quarter of Cambodia’s population had been killed by the end of 1979, when the Vietnamese army put an end to the horror. There are hardly any old people to be found in Cambodia.

The crime was education!

Next to the bunks hang pictures of those tortured or deceased there. The torture was purely arbitrary, for the “crime” was the education, and the interrogations merely further torture.

They were given just enough care to keep them alive for further torture.

To be “guilty” it was enough to wear glasses!

Pol Pot had photographs taken of every prisoner. The galleries are endless, entire rooms filled with pictures of children, innocent faces staring defiantly or brokenly into the camera, not understanding their cruel fate and unaware that they would be killed shortly after the picture was taken. Thousands of men and women, young and old. And at the same time, there were also photographs of the guards, who were “replaced” every year, because the entire old guard force was shot, every single year. The guards were mostly young men, teenagers, trained in cruelty and, in a bloodlust, murdering and torturing in Pol Pot’s name. There were five men who managed to escape, and only through them did we know what happened within these walls. One painted his memories in oil on canvas, depictions of abuse, torture, and death.

I feel indescribably uneasy; beggars and disabled people, clearly marked by this very time, once again besiege us outside the gate. I meet Ian outside in a café. He hasn’t bothered to visit the museum in a long time. It takes some time until we’re all together again, except for Glen. The beggars follow each of us almost into the bus, knocking on the windows. The driver fights his way through, and we leave the city to head for the Killing Fields.

The day is sunny, the road is full of potholes, and around us lies a vast plain, rice fields from which many isolated palm trees rise.

Passing a souvenir shop, we enter the museum grounds. A large, beautiful pagoda tower forms the center. But horror grips us when we see that the tower contains a huge glass case, which extends from the ground to the spire, a good thirty meters high, and takes up the entire interior of the tower. The case is filled to the last corner with skulls. The skulls were fished out of the adjacent river, our guide explains. According to belief, the souls of the deceased only have a chance of rebirth if the bodies are buried whole. But the Khmer Rouge wanted to further desecrate the dead in this way.

Around the memorial tower lie hundreds of holes, mass graves filled with up to five hundred corpses.

The place is utterly beautiful, nestled idyllic in the sun and among the trees. The slope is cool, but the ground you walk on is littered with small human bone fragments and teeth, kicked apart like pebbles by your shoes. The guide shows us a tree that looks like a large agave.

He explains how useful the tree is; the leaves can be used to produce fibers for ropes and mats, the resin is an excellent fuel and adhesive, and the wood is good for all kinds of processing. But the leaves are jagged and were used by the guards for gruesome mutilations of prisoners, the slowest and most painful beheadings. He shows us another tree, which looks like an old fig, and explains how they grabbed babies by the legs and beat them to kill them, or threw them on spears, or simply tossed them into the air to be shot with their rifles like “clay pigeons.” Pregnant women were slashed open out of sick curiosity. A memorial plaque calls Pol Pot’s cruelty worse than Hitler and his Holocaust. I doubt the authors ever visited Auschwitz.

I ask the guide how he fared, as he seems old enough to have experienced the time. He says he barely escaped with his life as a young boy, surviving through theft or simple food, roots, and worms, while half of his siblings perished as a result of the famine. He also narrowly escaped guards who wanted to kill him for fun. Ultimately, he and his family survived the agonizing time until the regime was ended by the Vietnamese invasion.

I feel sick. From behind a barbed wire fence, a few children call out, when they see me looking at them: “One, two, three – smile! Sir, one, two, three – smile! Photo, photo, please, sir!” More children arrive: children and cripples, amputees and deformed people, begging.

At the end of our trip to the Killing Fields, our guide Mo invites us to dinner at his home that evening, and of course we accept. Ian predicted that his wife is the best cook he knows, and we won’t have such a great meal again.

So we arrange to take a tuk-tuk to the family’s house. The house is located in a suburb of the city and is also just a simple stilt house. As soon as we get out of the tuk-tuks, we are immediately met by many children who take us by the hand and lead us to the house. I even have two children by my side. We pass a school where children are still sitting and writing. It is seven o’clock and pitch black. A child takes me by one hand and Mia by the other and leads us to the house. We exchange meaningful glances.

We are warmly welcomed by the family. Our friend introduces his wife and two young children. All the other children are from the families who also live in the house and the surrounding houses.

We sit down on the carpet in the living room, the only room besides the kitchen and bedroom. The walls are covered with images of Buddha and calendar pictures of the royal family. At the foot of the wall stands a small, colorful household altar with Buddha images and still-smoky incense sticks. After some friendly chat, the family serves us a huge meal: fried bananas and small spring rolls with a clear chili sauce, rice and noodles with meatballs and vegetables, curry with chicken and pineapple, and an amok, a kind of fondue pot with fish, vegetables, onions, and banana leaves in a delicate broth. I’m so full that I literally can’t speak another word.

As in Vietnam, it is unfortunately traditional for hosts not to share food with their guests so that they can give them full attention.

At our request, our host tells us his story while he sits with us, his little daughter doing gymnastics on his back. As a boy, he bought a motorbike to drive tourists, but the competition was fierce. Thanks to the tourists, he learned some English, and eventually, an Australian gave him the tip to write “I speak English” on his cap. He followed the advice and was very successful, as language barriers often led to misunderstandings, so most tourists much preferred an English-speaking driver. On his rides, he always told his guests a bit about the area, and once his passenger asked him if he would like to guide him and his group around the area. He got a job guiding groups on the side, which helped him earn some extra money, and his English improved enormously. He was also able to give English lessons to children.

Unfortunately, he can only give lessons at the moment because so many groups aren’t coming, and he had an accident a few weeks ago. The case was clear: the other scooter cut him off. However, the legal system in that country usually works in such a way that the one with more financial resources wins. The other one, however, was just as poor and couldn’t repair the damage. They both had to raise two hundred dollars for the police and the “processing costs,” which was a few months’ worth of money. And the scooter is broken.

We say a warm goodbye, then the children take us back to our tuk-tuks. Later, we collect some money, which Ian will send to the family again for the repair of the motorbike.

For me, my time in Phnom Penh is over. The next morning, we take a small plane to the town of Siem Reap, near Angkor Wat.