I visited and toured both the Killing Fields in Cambodia and the Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany this year. Before my experience in these two places, I had never learned about genocide outside of a classroom setting. I came away from each place with different lessons and understandings (and misunderstandings) about humanity and life itself. These two visits were emotion evoking, but in starkly different ways. I had powerful experiences at each of these sites with horrific pasts and I feel strongly about what I have to share. I would like to dedicate this post to all the lives that have been lost in genocide, specifically at the Killing Fields and Dachau Concentration Camp.
The Cambodian genocide was carried out by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 under their dictator, Pol Pat. It is estimated that it killed between 1.5 and 3 million people, essentially wiping out an entire generation. I knew very little about the genocide before I stepped foot on the Killing Fields, but when I first entered the gardens, I was shocked. The first thing I saw was a towerof human skulls. It stood a few hundred feet away, directly in front of me, and I couldn’t stop looking at it. It was haunting. I remember listening to my audio guide, trying to focus on what I was hearing through my earphones, but struggling. It was difficult to concentrate on something else while this monument was so grotesquely intriguing to me. In hindsight, the tower acted as a harbinger to the rest of the vastly tangible, raw emotion that is ever-present at the Killing Fields. Throughout the rest of my tour, I saw the weapons that were used to kill the Cambodians, rags and cloth that the people wore, and even the “beating tree,” where soldiers of the Khmer Rouge would beat babies and brutally kill them. I heard audio recordings of the traditional Cambodian music they would play over the loud sounds of a generator to cover the screams of people as they died. Everything was so real. Too real. I cried multiple times throughout that day, both during and after the tour. I was so horrified by the entire place. Everything was preserved and put on display in the original locations to give visitors a better idea of what occurred there. I felt like I was truly getting a glimpse of what many Cambodian people went through during this terrible time. Dachau was different. It was chilling and desolate. Throughout most of my audio-guided tour there, I felt detached. I was numbed to what I was hearing and what I was seeing. As I walked throughout the camp, it was mostly empty space with some dead trees placed in eerily perfect patterns. I had a difficult time comprehending the atrocities that occurred at the camp because none of it felt real. There was no tangible evidence. My mind wandered and I had to imagine what occurred there as I listened to a survivor recount his story. I had to convince myself that the massive “roll-call square” was too small to fit all of the prisoners that Dachau held. It just wasn’t logically possible. I remember walking in between the foundations of the barracks, which were behind the attendance area. All of the buildings had been taken down, so I only saw the concrete squares that were originally used to hold the buildings up. Again, I felt disconnected. How could people have lived here? It wasn’t possible to me. None of it was real. As I exited that area, I came across the religious memorials that were built to commemorate all those lives lost at Dachau. I thought that entering each chapel would be powerful, but again I felt underwhelmed. But then I reached the crematorium, the emotional apex of my tour. It all hit me there, and I immediately was able to conceptualize the horrors at this camp. I walked through “Barrack X,” which was home to the main gas chamber and crematorium. I felt an intense chill go over my entire body. I was standing in the chamber where thousands of prisoners had gone in to “take showers” and were killed within fifteen minutes of being sprayed with gas and acid. After only spending a few minutes there, I couldn’t take it anymore and I left the barrack. As I returned to the visitor center, I walked back through the barracks and the square. It was all real for me now. I could finally imagine what happened on those grounds. I experienced different emotions between the Killing Fields and Dachau. I witnessed the overwhelmingly tangible aspects of the Killing Fields, whereas at Dachau I had to listen to my audio guide and imagine what happened, until I reached the crematorium. There is one overarching similarity, though. Neither place felt like it could even be on this earth. And this is where my misunderstandings for humanity and life come into play. I still just do not understand how any human being, either in the Khmer Rouge or the Nazi party, could have done the unspeakable things that they did to other human beings. Unfortunately, that is the link between the Killing Fields and Dachau- their impossible acts of inhumanity against their own people. I took valuable lessons from each visit. I now believe that it’s worth itto go and see these places and learn what happened for myself. I learned more about the topic of genocide by going straight to the sites and learning from unbiased sources, which is something I couldn’t get in a classroom. Overall, visiting these places has made me think about eliminating my own small cruelties against myself and others. Anything that I can do to be a better person, and to slightly improve the lives of others around me, is what I strive for. In discovering this for ourselves, we can prevent these atrocities from occurring in the future.
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the story of empoWer…
As Babson students, Anusha and Noor noticed the absence of a community that allows equality in participation and involvement for members looking to discuss pressing societal challenges. We observed that none of the organizations in the BOW community strive to create social value through their writing or maintain their clubs solely for self-development. We were determined to create an open and welcoming environment, free of deadlines or mandatory publications, where non-binary individuals and women can speak their truths. empoWer is unique in its structure as all of our members decide their level of involvement, creating a mixture of autonomy and community. As we frequently promote, empoWer is a three college collaboration across Babson, Olin, and Wellesley, committed to creating a supportive community for its members to productively confront unconventional, social issues through writing. As an organization focused on self-development, empoWer’s main mission is to allow ourselves to understand that all of our past, current, and future experiences have value and purpose. We host biweekly workshops that consist of subtopics that contribute to a larger monthly topic. Our subtopics range from anything about our hair to our futures, uncovering parts of a larger whole. Usually, our workshops include some artistic pieces coupled with discussion to produce thoughtful writing. We plan to work with LegacyKept, a company that aims to preserve life stories, to publish our members’ work. a member’s perspective We caught up with one of our members, Babson sophomore Maria Herwagen to hear how joining empoWer impacted her as a female writer. Coming into Babson, Maria was excited to have the opportunity to join other clubs and cohorts of female writers, hence her decision to join empoWer, calling it a “collaborative space where women came together in terms of writing”. The aspect of having structured writing spaces and times drew her interest in the organization. Maria went on to describe how because English is not her first language, people might not be interested in hearing what she puts on paper. When reflecting on her time with empoWer, Maria emphasized how she has become a more confident writer through the support and engagement of empoWer’s members towards her writing pieces. Maria said the most rewarding part of being in empoWer is her connectivity and conversations with her BOW peers, which leads her to better understand her own identity. so what next for empoWer? Speaking from personal experiences, the era of COVID-19 created a lingering feeling of detachment from society. In this age of tens of hundreds of Zoom and virtual calls, it feels as though isolation is the new normal. So how do we re-engage with our community and get in tune with ourselves? This is the next step for empoWer. Our goal is to continue to connect and empower women and non-binary individuals from the Babson, Olin, and Wellesley College community. By creating this community, we strive to enable connections of students that might not otherwise have been made. Furthermore, we hope that through various writing prompts about a variety of topics, our members will become more in touch with themselves and others. |
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