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While in Cambodia, we did not go and visit the museum of the killing fields although we felt we ought to have, an opportunity did not fall in our lap and so we didn't. Our only encounters therefore with the bestiality of the Khmer Rouge was through an eye-witness acount book and a visit to the so-called School of Death.

The School of Death was a former school in Phnom Penh that had been devoted during the Khmer Roughe regime to a political prison. Here prisoners were imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, and killed in the name of "Progress". It was an experience akin only to visits to the Nazi death camps of Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Perhaps a visit to this place would convince those who haven't yet realized it that we are all capable of this type of cruelty and wantonness. After all, the people killed here were not foreigners, outsiders, interlopers, or anything else. They were Cambodians, fellow-citizens, neighbors.

There was little to exhibit except for a few grainy photos and some yellowing newspaper articles. But the main exhibit was the building itself. A house of learning transformed into a place of such ignorance it belies belief. One part of the building still had the partitions that had been added to house the prisoners, each with a metal stake so that the prisoner could be tied to it like a dog.

Our other experience came from a memoir written by a Cambodian woman who at 15 was expelled with her family from Phnom Penh and experienced heart-wrenching hardships until finally she managed to get herself into Thailand and from there to get to the United States. The title of the book is "When Broken Glass Floats" and it was written by Chanrithy Him.