I look beyond my gaze and notice thick barbed wires circling like acrobats round and round, round and round with electricity. The biggest school in Phnom Penh; sounds of laughter and history of children playing, learning, reading everywhere muffled by the sound of agony, fear, despair, and starvation. A metal bed, rusted with use, echoes muffled screams of agony. The interrogation room. Pool spilled blood stained tiles displayed by the photo above the bed, endless bodies motionless and idle, the bed is still there, everything is still there. Untouched. Rusted metal, thick shackles gripped the ankles of anyone and everyone. Historical photos line the walls of everyone before the act of torture, each look and each eye. The horror of fear. Every act, every move, every procedure, everything recorded.

Dialated eyes of fear peer by the hundreds across the board. Photographs catalogued the fear striken bones, fear stricken souls caught by the frame of time, catalogued death, catalogued genocidal massacre. No smiles anywhere. Starved ribcages and thin bone cheeks and wide teeth mouths look beyond into minutes after being tortured.

Its still hot. A slow drip down my skull and I choke on the dust around me. Building A. I pass a doorway, and I look through doorway after doorway peering to the wall at the far end, connected by walls with no bars. And they still hear the screams, the craziness, the fear and the deep drunk deep intake mouth convulsing cry. Cement outlines of walls on the tiled floor loomed upwards, walls thick, seperating cells upon cells where men waited, shackled. Thick iron rusted. "This room was the torture room." As you can still see the instruments used for torture." Blunted axe, thick wooden stick hand worn by oily hands, darker color. Young and scared and starved, they were lowered down into a wooden flat rectangular crate to fill water and handcuffed to drown their victims. When they became unconscious, they were then dipped, hanging upside down into a thick sludge of sewer water. An arm pulls you through a wooden crate, handcuffed, gripped and a fingernail is pulled out.

The pictures, the women, the men, the young the old, monks, all were victims of pain, and torture and more pain and more starvation. Everyday they were interrogated and everyday tortured. To search for their enemy of the party. 'The Angkar' A totalitarian agarian society.

My footsteps echoed down the hall and I look down at the countless of other steps that have passed through this doorway, this cell, this place where I stand still and look outside in the courtyard of torture to see a pail of water used to make a person into a fish. If not even further into the horror of the mind. Babies thrown as baseballs against a tree and killed like animals.

A long death march 15 km away, at night to the "killing fields" knowing your family and yourself are going to dig your graves, all are going to die one by one. Shovel by shovel. You look at the dirt by which will cover you and your family when you are done, wacking your neck with a blunt wood of an axe, in the backside of the neck, slipping down into the hole.

Snap! . . . Snap! . . . Snap! . . . Snap!

The stares of skulls piled high, 10-20-30-40 years old skulls catorgized sections and old worn clothes piled high and torn, buried beneath the soil. The killing fields. Clothes worn by rain and dirt tucked away by the foot path and bones portruding from the gravesite, the killing fields.

From prison to death pit, they were executed with one by one, children, women, men, grandmother, grandfather, each saw their families die one by one looking at their own hellish fate.

A place of horror and a place of remembrance. I look at my hand and tear to see a golden pagoda dedicated to the victims and a colorful string of a hundred orgami cranes offering peace to this place and the world. A glimmer of hope and peace as the history and past is for, and from the past, the hands that grabs the past and impermeably let go. Full round circle, history and the past moves on disappearing into the limelight of understanding and wisdom. The Past is only the Past, for the Past and not the Present or the Future. And only then when we forgive history, we can move on from history.