Speechless with horror!

The room smells musty, a crib with an iron bar as an ankle bracelet stands in the middle, and to the left and right are screens with pictures of perpetrators and victims. Something indescribably evil emanates from this former classroom; it creeps under my skin.

I'm wearing sunglasses as I fight back tears of horror at what I see here in this man-made hell.

I always thought I was tough, but this is too much!

Frel left the building long ago. She can't stand it anymore, sitting on a bench, white as a sheet, tears of dismay streaming down her cheeks.

We are in the infamous prison S 21.

In the heart of Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, lies this place of unimaginable horror: Tuol Sleng, the former Khmer Rouge torture prison. Today it serves as a museum.

The simple fence, behind which large palm trees and a few dilapidated buildings can be seen, hardly reveals that this place once played a fateful role. Even the spacious courtyard with benches and small green spaces gives little hint of what happened here in the mid- to late 1970s.

From 1975 to 1979, at a time when we in the West celebrated the band Queen for Bohemian Rhapsody, danced to Dancing Queen by Abba in discos or watched Saturday Night Fever in cinemas, unimaginable horror reigned everywhere in Cambodia...and nobody cared.

It is estimated that the Khmer Rouge slaughtered two to three million of their own citizens. Nearly 20,000 people were imprisoned in this former school alone between 1976 and 1979. The name is synonymous with the Cambodian Holocaust: Tuol Sang or S21.

Almost all of the prisoners died either through torture or were brutally murdered in the so-called Killing Fields outside Phnom Penh. Only about a dozen survived.

S21 is just one of many such places.

This horrific record reflects the brutality with which the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia during this period.

With their left-wing ideology, the communist Khmer Rouge killed millions of people, a third of their own population.

They are the victims of the left-wing extremist dream of a more just communist state. The new human being was to be created. No more schools or universities; everything was closed in order to create, in this twisted ideology, the perfect, selfless human being who exists solely for the system.

The aim now was to eradicate the thinking elite.

Men, women, even babies, higher-earning, educated people. Doctors, architects, teachers, entrepreneurs, monks, even anyone who spoke a foreign language or even wore glasses was considered suspect.

They were locked up in one of the numerous prisons like S21 and tortured until they obtained a confession and thus a license to murder.

It was considered that a bullet was too expensive for the execution, and so these "enemies of the system" were brought outside the city and killed with axes, clubs, spades, or iron bars.

Their bodies were simply left lying or hastily buried in mass graves. The decomposing bodies served as fertilizer for the rice fields.

These Killing Fields can be found all over Cambodia and some now serve as memorials to one of humanity's worst crimes.

From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge raged with their twisted left-wing ideology under the leadership of Pol Pot, Brother No. 1, until Vietnam put an end to the horror.

The West looked the other way, as the rise of the Khmer Rouge was due to the Americans and their bombing of what was essentially neutral Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

In 1973 alone, US bombers dropped twice as many bombs on Cambodia during the Vietnam War as they dropped on Japan during the entire Second World War. Kim

We are still amazed by Cambodia's centuries-old, fantastic culture and wonder how this could have happened...but this question can be asked about almost every country in the world that has been led towards the abyss by religious, right-wing or left-wing ideologies.

In the case of leftist ideologies, it was not only Cambodia's Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, but also Stalin, North Korea's Kim dynasties, China's Mao Zedong, Zimbabwe's Mugabe, Cuba's Castro and so many others who were responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people worldwide.

We were both very quiet during those days. Shocked, sad, and angry, we asked ourselves: "What has the world learned from this?"

Maybe the following:

Not only is the universe infinite, but so is the stupidity, the malice, the naivety and the will to survive of people!