One of the things about teaching is that you find yourself scrambling a lot to stay ahead of your class and find answers to their questions. I felt pretty confident when I started but the only way I could provide all the answers was if I ignored some of the questions (or told my students they wouldn't be covered in the class). When it became obvious that there were huge segments of American history that none of us had learned much about and we all wanted to discuss I chucked the textbook (this was around year 1 of my 5 years) and started building notes. Finding out some things was easy (Korean War, Vietnam War, break up of Yugoslavia, etc) but my students always surprised me. One of the places they wanted to know more about was Cambodia. This was partly due to the face that several of them were born in Cambodia or the children of former Cambodian refugees. Back then, in the mid-90s, researching Cambodia pretty much didn't extend beyond watching The Killing Fields. I was thrilled when I discovered Elizabeth Becker's When the War Was Over and was able to finally get a comprehensive handle on what happened there leading to Pol Pot's takeover and the horrors of the Khmer Rouge.

Becker was a journalist who started covering Cambodia in 1973 for the Washington Post and then later, traveled there after the Vietnamese forced out the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Originally published in 1986 she updated the book in 1998 to include the death of Pol Pot and the national reconciliation process that included trials and acknowledgments of guilt. What's really interesting is that the book is not just Becker's outsider perception but includes the voices of dozens of those who survived it and also other journalists who covered Pol Pot's reign of terror. The horror of the Tuol Sleng prison is covered at length and if you have never read about it then it will break your heart. It is the pictures from Tuol Sleng that always get me - and that nearly all of those people are dead for reasons that escape any sane person. I don't think there are enough tears in the world for what happened to the men, women and children of Tuol Sleng.

When the War Was Over goes far beyond the surface of modern Cambodian history. Becker does a great job of showing the politics that was played between other countries and how the world so easily ignored the death of millions of people at the hands of their own government. (Another example of when genocide is not, apparently, genocide.) The passages on how other countries waited for the Vietnamese to leave before they would provide humanitarian are so frustrating. Everyone - the Vietnamese and the rest of the world, played games with Cambodian lives. And still, hardly anyone on the west even remembers.

[Post pics of two unidentified prisoners at Tuol Sleng. Only twelve prisoners are known to have survived Tuol Sleng. It is now a genocide museum.]