Driving down the street in Cambodia, I can't help but think to myself that each and every person over the age of 30 has some horrific story to tell. In just four short years from 1975-1979, 25% of Cambodia's population perished if not from execution by the government, then from starvation.
While I was here, I read a book entitled "First They Killed My Father" - the story of a girl just 6 years old when the Khumer Rouge forced the evacuation of the entire population of Phnom Penh into the countryside. Her father, a minister in the overthrown government, succeed in hiding his identity for months until he was one day taken away never to return. Her older sister died of starvation in a labor camp for children. Three of the siblings dispersed to various child labor camps and survived. Her youngest sister stayed behind with her mother and just months before the end of the Vietnamese succeeded in outsting the Khumer Rough, they were executed.
You read about genocide like Cambodia's story, but it's impossible to grasp from your comfortable perch just how horrific the atrocities were. Visiting the school converted to a prison where all but a few of it's several thousand inmates were executed, and touring the largest of thousands of killing fields across the country, bones embedded in the dirt at every turn, I began to scratch the survace of understanding.
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