The Genocide Museum by Zander

Whenever there is a revolution bad things happen to the people that don't have power. In Cambodia when my mom was a Little girl, the Kmer Rouge took over Cambodia.  They did some horrible things to the people of Cambodia. They killed all the people that had an education and anyone who spoke against them. At the museums/ high school/ prison S21, the Genocide Museum in Phnom Pen. Cambodia,that we went with my dad becasue we didn't know if my mom could hanal it. We got to see and read about all the prisoners who were at the prison and what they had to go through. It was really nasty the stuff we saw that people did to there own country to stay in power.


The Kmer Rouge are a organisation that was controlled by Pol Pot. They took over Cambodia. When they did they didn't want a revolt so they killed alot of innocent people just because they might cause a problem or say the wrong things. For instance, anyone who could read or write or looked like they were in the millitary was killed. Or they sent them to a camp like the one that we visited. In Phnom Pen, there was the biggest one.  In its time, there were over 17,000 people killed there, and only 7 survived. They killed women and children just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or they lived close to someone important.

There were a ton of camps like that all over Cambodia. In Phnom Pen, the Kmer Rouge converted a high school into one of the prisons and a torturing camp. They chained people to beds, and if they made a sound, then they clubbed them.  They had sollitary confinement, and they didn't feed them. They torched all the prisoners and  made them confess to something that they didn't do. When they confessed, they took them out and killed them. In the torture room, they showed all there torture devices.  They cut of peoples fingers, stuck there heads in water, wipped them, clubbed them, and had them bitten by poisonous animals until they confessed. Then they took them away and buried them in communal graves. All the people outside the camps didn't know that it was happening. It was really sick that people could do all this stuff and could live with them self.


My family that lived in Cambodia lived through it. My Grandpa, was educated. He fooled that Kmer Rouge into thinking that he was not educated, so he didn't have to go to the camps.  But some of my more extended family didn't get so lucky and they were killed. My family had to work really hard and didn't get fed very much. My mom's family ran away to Thailand 3 times before they were let into the refugee camp. My grandpa got 7 kids, a nephew, son-in-law, and his wife to safety, pretty amazing! Unfortunately, he died of a stroke a month before my mom's family was due to leave for France. After he died my Grandma swiched their destinatination to the US because that is where her side of the family went. The stroke was a result of one of the Kmer Rouge's soldiers hit him with a club when he took some fruit off the ground to give to my Grandma back at the concentration camp. I am really gratefully of him, because he got my mom and her family to the refuge camp and helped them get a better life. 

Seeing what  the Kmer Rouge did to there own people, it is really sad that they did all the horrible things just to stay in power. There have been lots of instances like the holocaust that have happened. In Cambodia, about 1/3 of the population died in the civil war with the Kmer Rouge just because they were educated and they could make a revolt. Hitler did the same thing with the Jews, and alot of people died because of it.  Whenever a tyrant takes over a country, they almost always end up dead. It is sad that Cambodia had to go through a really big civil war and lost alot of people because of one person.  It is really good that they made museums to tell the world about all the horrible things that the Kmer Rouge did to their own people, so they won't do it again.