Forty Years After the Zero Years

The healing process has begun in Cambodia, but grief is still close to the surface for those who survived the “Zero Years” of the Khmer Rouge. Our guide, with tears streaming down her face, told us of losing her entire family. Her father, one of the “new people,” had taught at the high school turned prison and torture chamber.

An artist we met painted portraits of victims on burlap, thus my use of burlap for the picture of the mother and child, two among the thousands tortured and eliminated at the Tuol Sleng Prison, the same high school where our guide's father had taught.