by Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua)

We went into a museum that used to be a high school

but under Pol Pot the high school became the biggest prison in Cambodia.

The classrooms divided into little cells.

Here one only came to die.

More than 20,000 prisoners passed through here of whom only 17 survived,

the ones who hadn’t yet been killed when the liberation troops arrived.

This was Pol Pot’s ‘Democratic Cambodia.’

Here are the photos taken of then on entering.

They took photos of them all.

Some with their hands tied, others wearing chains and iron collars.

The worst thing to see was the horror in their faces.

You could see they weren’t looking at the camera,

but at death and the torture before death.

But even more shocking was a smiling face:

a girl, or teenage boy, someone innocent, unaware

evidently of what was going to happen to them.

And photos of mothers with babies.

Some crude device for pulling off finger nails.

Tongs of tearing off nipples.

A great many different kind of tools...

The tank where they were held underwater.

The posts where they were hanged.

The cell where Pol Pot’s Minister of Information was also held before being killed.

More than 100 mass graves where they buried them have been found.

The infant buried with their milk bottles and pacifiers.

And the skulls, large pile of skulls that nobody wants to see.

They killed 3 of 10 million inhabitants.

They destroyed the factories, the schools, the medicines.

They’d jail someone for wearing glasses.

The town remained deserted.

The whole world knew about this.

How can it be that now, since Kampuchea was liberated,

the North American press doesn’t speak badly of Pol Pot?

Finally we went outside.

There were flowers outside.

In a clean puddle a white duck fluttered

bathing itself in the water and sun.

The young women who passed by the street

looked like pagodas.