What Survives

Mementos From The Cambodian Genocide

Sandal and footprint with thorns. These sandals belong to my father, Kim Hap. He got them just after the war so he could remember the darkness of that period. People who lived through the Khmer Rouge regime recognise this type of sandal right away. My father told me, “Not everyone had sandals to wear. They were only distributed to Khmer Rouge soldiers and those who worked for them. Ordinary people had to walk barefoot even through thorns.”
01 February, 2015

IN 2010, Kim Hak, then twenty-nine years old, joined his grandmother and some cousins on a trip to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh. Under the rule of the Khmer Rouge, between 1975 and 1979, the site housed the infamous Security Prison 21, one of hundreds of killing centres across Cambodia established as part of a campaign of extermination targeted particularly at minorities and the intelligentsia. As many as twenty thousand people are thought to have lost their lives at the prison, and as many as three million in the genocide. Kim Hak’s grandmother could not bring herself to walk through the rooms and cells. “It shocked her,” Kim Hak said. “She just sat in the garden of the museum with her painful face.”

Kim Hak was born in 1981, and grew up in Battambang, in the north-west of the country, hearing terrifying stories of the Khmer Rouge’s reign. His parents, like millions of other Cambodians, were forced from their home and into work camps in the countryside as part of the regime’s attempt to achieve “agrarian socialism.” Each person’s past became a potentially lethal thing; people risked death, Kim Hak said, “if only one Khmer Rouge soldier found out who they are, especially well-educated people or former government or army officers.” Many abandoned all recognisable mementos. Instead, they imbued with their memories the few things they could keep—clothes, cooking and eating utensils, simple pieces of jewellery. Some families now hold these objects so dear that they pass them on as heirlooms.

These photographs are part of Kim Hak’s ongoing effort to document such souvenirs. “It is a race against the clock because living witnesses are gradually disappearing,” he said.His method is fairly simple: he shoots all items under natural light, always at the same time of day for uniformity, against a black background. The background, he said, is meant to make the objects more striking, and to signify the dark history they represent. Kim Hak’s focus on deeply personal stories sets his work apart from the many visual projects on the genocide that look explicitly at torture and death. He hopes these microcosmic stories add to the largely anonymous grand history of the genocide, and remind young people of the deeply personal losses their parents and grandparents suffered. That, he hopes, will help all generations of Cambodians speak openly of the Khmer Rouge era and so deal with the associated trauma, and serve as a warning against any repeat of its horrors.