A photograph of the ancient ruins at Angkor Wat, capturing the spirituality and mysterious beauty of Cambodia’s famed temples, hangs in grim contrast to the other pictures in a new exhibition, ones that speak to the unspeakable about this country’s recent past. “Encountering the Cambodian Genocide,” composed of photographs and essays by Chantal Prunier, a Palisades resident, opens on September 15 at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge, led by despot Pol Pot, seized power in Cambodia. This marked the beginning of a reign of terror that resulted in the most widespread genocide of modern times. Forty percent of the population perished in four years. Prunier’s exhibit includes 17 of her photographs taken during a trip to Cambodia last spring, along with 10 essays she wrote. She visited Tuol Sleng, the most notorious prison camp and execution center from the genocide years, now open to the public as a museum in Phnom Penh, and the infamous “killing fields” of Choeung Ek, a soccer-field sized site nine miles outside Phnom Penh, containing mass graves, slightly sunken, for perhaps 20,000 Cambodians, many of whom were tortured before being killed. The photograph of Angkor Wat is the only one in the show that doesn’t pertain to the genocide. “The exhibit starts with that picture because we begin by talking about the history of Cambodia,” says Prunier. “A lot of people go to Cambodia these days, but they don’t go to Phnom Penh, they go to these beautiful ancient temples. They are stunning, but that was 1,000 years ago.” Prunier’s own travels to Cambodia, a country she’s visited four times in the past seven years, began with just such an isolated visit to the famed temples, but where she encountered the country’s recent dark past via her guide, a person who revealed his role as a Khmer Rouge soldier. “It took him a day or two to talk about it,” recalls Prunier. “He spoke of having done horrible things, but he said what they all say: he was forced to do it.” The Khmer Rouge leaders, in keeping with their perverse revolutionary goals, broke up families and sent children as young as three to camps where they would work and be indoctrinated. In order to serve the revolution, disciples needed to renounce material possessions and leave their families. Submitting to discipline and confessing one’s faults was essential to gaining status as a “truly devoted.” All towns and villages were emptied with huge populations redeployed to work in the fields. Those who resisted the new order were shot to death. Members of the former government, intellectuals, professors and doctors were summarily executed, followed by a second wave of killings that pinpointed teachers, nurses, craftsman and monks. The new recruits who carried out these murders were often just teenagers. “That is what is really haunting about present-day Cambodia,” says Prunier, referring to how most of the Khmer Rouge perpetrators, people who committed unimaginable acts of savagery, were never prosecuted and are free today. “When Cambodians walk in the street and see a person 45 years or older, they know that person could have been one of those people who killed others.” Prunier, who grew up in the Burgundy region of France, says her background predisposed her to having a fascination with Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia, a former French colony. A keen interest, also, in social and political issues, led her to delve into the subject of the Khmer Rouge and the horror they inflicted on Cambodia. Prunier describes her foray into photography and journalism as her second career. She attended college at Ecole Superieure de Commerce in Dijon, France, and Harvard Business School. Her first career in business was put on hiatus after she married and had children. She and her husband, Michael Grindon, and their three children moved to the Palisades from the East Coast 14 years ago. When she talked about her Cambodian research and shared photographs with friends, some of whom are board members at the Holocaust Museum, they encouraged the idea of mounting an exhibition. “Man’s inhumanity to man crosses all traditional boundaries,” writes Rachel Lithgow, executive director for the L.A. Holocaust Museum, a museum founded in 1961 by survivors of the Jewish Holocaust. Recalling a genocide’even one that took place 35 years after the Holocaust in another corner of the world’ is central to the museum’s mission to commemorate and remember. In fact, one case in the exhibition is devoted to placing images of the Cambodian genocide side-by-side with photographs from the Holocaust, illuminating their disturbing similarities. Prunier’s photographs are accompanied by in-depth essays chronicling the history of Cambodia and the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge (the country was “liberated” by the Vietnamese in 1979). Text about the atrocities, for which there is extensive documentation as well as oral histories by survivors, uncovers acts of extreme cruelty. At Tuol Sleng, one of 20 known prison camps where torture was performed on a daily basis, women arriving with young children would be held by the hair while a game was made of tossing their babies up in the air and shooting them. Prunier describes how killings became intensely physical as ammunition became scarce. “They didn’t want to use their precious bullets, so they would do horrible things, like smashing children’s heads against tree trunks,” she says. Although 60 percent of Cambodian’s current population of 12 million were born after the end of the genocide, the scars are still very much present, says Prunier. “In Cambodia, you can’t walk down the street and look anyone in the eye because they are still scared. There are all kinds of things they remember.” The exhibition continues through November 15 at the Museum of the Holocaust, 6435 Wilshire Blvd. (one block east of Fairfax). Contact: (323) 651-3704. (Palisadian-Post Intern Nikila Sri-Kumar, a student at Harvard Westlake, contributed to this story.)
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