Cambodia, Day 11

I was a World War Two buff for most of my childhood, so I read a lot of written accounts of the Holocaust. Then, in 1997, when I was closing in on thirty years old, I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. just a few years after it opened. I stood in a boxcar that had transported victims to Auschwitz. I looked through a gas chamber door. I stared at a huge pile of shoes, clothes and suitcases whose owners no longer needed them.

When we left the museum, I couldn't speak. For about an hour, I could not form words. It wasn't sadness or anguish; it more resembled shock, and the condition of being entirely overwhelmed. Those written accounts had supplied me with dates, facts and figures, but the material reality, close enough to see, unmediated, in the same room with me, gave it power I could not have foreseen.

I've read a lot about the Cambodian genocide over the years. I know a great deal about the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields. I've seen the film and worked through several books on the subject. But today we visited Tuol Sleng prison and the Choeung Ek mass grave. They didn't hit with as much force, because I think you can only lose your innocence once, but they were sobering.

And I don't think there's Scripture that can do justice to the whole affair better than Jeremiah.