TOM: Was that because the fathers had been killed in the death camps?
DAD: We don’t know, obviously, but a lot of the men would have been more likely to be worked to death or killed for whatever reasons. The Khmer Rouge took young teenagers and broke them out of family and parent relationships and trained them to be mindless servants of the organization so that they were willing to kill their own parents and siblings in a way that totally destroyed a normal parent-child relationship.
We were the first Western representatives who were taken to the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, which had been a French girl’s school, and was taken over as an interrogation center by the Khmer Rouge. In the same way that Hitler and some other tyrannical organizations have operated, they documented meticulously the people they arrested and brought in, including taking Polaroid’s photographs, and forced them to the point of making a confession. Then they killed them. Thousands went through Tuol Sleng, were subjected to that abuse and then taken out and killed. It was the Auschwitz of the Cambodian Holocaust.
When we got there, the people—the new government such as it was under Vietnamese tutelage because it was the Vietnamese army that drove the Khmer Rouge back—were trying to set the Tuol Sleng prison as an exhibit of how barbarous the Khmer Rouge had been. They’d gone into the files and gotten out these headshots of the people who went through and had been murdered. They had a room with two whole walls covered top to bottom, side to side with individual headshots. We were the first Westerners to walk through and look at all those faces. Every one of them had been killed in this facility.
TOM: And were they all men?
DAD: No. Women, kids, older people. If anybody was regarded as suspect, they brought in the whole family. Some of the kids were as young as six or seven, pretty clearly looking scared. Most of them looked quite blank. They knew, roughly, what was coming, but most of them are open-eyed and you get a full face looking back at the camera and then you have this terrible sense of what lay ahead for that person. They were just hundreds, thousands on the walls and there were tens of thousands probably overall, that were processed and killed before the saga of the Khmer Rouge came to an end.
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Photo Credit: Christian Haugen
About Tom Matlack
Vocalyze
Excellent interview, Tom. I am very glad that you were able to sit down and connect with your father like this. As much as we think we know our dads at times, there is always more to the story—small (or in your case, large) details that would have gone otherwise untold unless you spend quality talk time.
I enjoyed this. You both are good men.
What an interesting guy your dad is, Tom!.
One of the striking things that comes through this conversation is that despite your returning to the father/son theme over and over, in so many instances that you and your dad address the fathers were not present, or the men were not in family situations etc. Makes it clear how major a shift your generation is in the midst of, and how timely your focus is!
Thanks for showing open interest in your son’s cause, Jean Matlack, in your comment here and your own interview in May. Discovering his TGMP work is one of the best things that’s happened for me in the past few months. It does my heart good to see Tom honoring his father and mother while finding his own way!
Tom, It took me a couple year’s after my Father Passed away in September of 1999, to understand who he was but more importantly The man I thought I had to be…
I think our Fathers, seem so Hero like as children in our eye’s! As we age and mature, They have exspectation’s and we tend to think or believe what they want for us, is Not in our plan’s. So we fighnt it every step along the way.
Tom, My Dad many times through out my childhood made me feel WEAK and Unexcepted! Growing up My eye’s saw his true streagth! I feared his streagth’s and he taught me that this was RESPECT… Sadly year’s after his Death I understood RESPECT in my understanding was not the true meaning. My Respect was out of Fear! That took me awhile too fully understand this Impact in my life.
This is what I do and Have alway’s known of my Father! He relentlessly worked Hard for my Brother’s and my Sister’s! Nothing Came easy and This to the very end is what I had questioned in my own life after he passed away! His Legacy in my eye’s has a diffrent meaning now than before 2002. I am so-proud to say I am his son and His hand’s and hard work in life is the most Important to me. I love him and Yes I maybe diffrent than him on many level’s both as a Father and a Man. I have found we all take alittle bit from each person that we saw Influenced our live’s. Then as we Mature, All those Little thing’s mold us into the men we are! Thank You. Rick Poplar Bluff, Missouri.