While in Phnom Penh, all should visit Tuol Sleng, now the Museum of Genocidal Crimes. Seeing this site and hearing guides describe the horrors that Cambodians suffered there impacts every visitor differently but leaves all with vivid impressions and memories.

	Pol Pot (1928-1998)

Tuol Sleng is one of the most important reminders of the Cambodian Holocaust directed by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

The larger rooms of this former three level school contain a single bed frame, left just as they were found when the Vietnamese "liberated" Cambodia in their postwar war (1975-79). The museum guide more than once pointed out the manner of death and bloodstains on walls and floors. There was only a single picture of the last victim killed in each of the larger rooms.

Pol Pot's atrocities are also presented with maps, showing the forced evacuation of the capital, and by use of hundreds of small ID photos of prisoners. Only seven left the prison alive!

In one of the other rooms they had crafted a large map of the country using skulls of victims! I could not bear to photograph that scene.

Before seeing the larger rooms again, those with hundreds of victims in ID photos, we entered several large rooms in which the walls of very small cells were left standing. The only toilet was a hole in the outer wall of each cell and an ammunition box in each cell.

Several weeks after returning home, I attended a Vietnam conference at American University. I met and talked to Loung Ung, who is a young Cambodian woman working with the Campaign for a Landmine Free World, a program of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Her father was a victim of Pol Pot's rule, and she left Cambodia when five years old. She has quite a story to tell and returns to Cambodia often in her work.

Perhaps you know a Cambodian survivor or refugee in your community who can relate, from a personal perspective, the importance of remembering this horrific episode in Cambodia's history.