S-21 and the Killing Fields

As you approach the place, it looks nice enough. Maybe like a secondary school where a Peace Corps volunteer landing a rare posh urban assignment might have enjoyed two stimulating years in the 1960s or '70s. But as the tuk-tuk draws closer, you notice a couple of tour buses parked nearby, and then the barbed wire.

In 1975, airy, spacious Tuol Svay Prey High School, just outside Phnom Penh, was converted by the Khmer Rouge into Tuol Sleng, Security Prison 21, or just S-21, an interrogation, torture and detention center. Now it is the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The place shows the history of, and serves as a memorial to, 17,000 of Pol Pot's Cambodian and other victims who either died at Tuol Sleng or were trucked out to the killing fields of suburban Choeung Ek to be stabbed or, more often, pounded to death.

Persons brought to Tuol Sleng were instructed to complete a "biography," as in seventh-grade English class. If you admitted to being a "new" Cambodian (educated, urban, professional) and not a "base" Cambodian (the peasantry), that status alone almost certainly got you killed. Most urban Cambodians were quickly shipped to the countryside to die of starvation and overwork when, literally overnight, Pol Pot turned Cambodia into an agrarian concentration camp. But people considered especially dangerous---former government workers, teachers, students, technicians and monks, as well as all members of their families, young or old---ended up at Tuol Sleng. Many lied on their bios, but they were usually found out.

Families---an institution deemed outmoded---were mostly split up. People were packed into small rooms in leg irons. They could not speak or even change position without asking permission. Most were tortured. One of the ten prison rules (see upcoming photo) was this: "When getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all." A piece of gym equipment in the pretty courtyard was used to hang people upside down until they lost consciousness and then to dunk their heads in the fertilizer bucket to wake them up. On display at the museum, along with other artifacts of torture, is a water-boarding device.

Under torture, people confessed to crazy things. A monk or a student might admit to being a "CIA agent." People named names of other "traitors to the revolution," including family members. The museum brochure includes these lines about the 10- to 15-year-olds who worked as guards: "Most of them started out as normal before growing increasingly evil. They were exceptionally cruel and disrespectful toward the prisoners and their elders."

At the museum---which is essentially the prison as it was discovered in 1979 when the Vietnamese drove Pol Pot out of Phnom Penh---the fetid cells and instruments of torture are hard to look at, but the thing that makes visiting this place close to unbearable is the photographs. Every prisoner had a mug shot taken. New arrivals too weak to sit up were strapped in place. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, so proud of their work, recorded everything. Galleries of the museum contain wall after wall of these faces staring into the camera with awful fright. It's like some high-school yearbook exhibit from hell. There are many photos, too, of the mutilated bodies of those tortured to death. In one cell, a museum visitor had left two frangipani blossoms next to a steel bludgeon.

The museum contained graffiti. Some looked as if they dated to the building's high-school days: a John Wayne-looking cowboy with a revolver, a sketch showing the workings of a human heart. The other graffiti were scrawled across photographs of former prison employees. In the accompanying text, these men expressed regret for the bad things that had gone on, but they said they had just been following orders. The writing slashed across these faces apparently by museum visitors---surviving family members of victims?---was in Khmer script, so we were unable to read it.

In an hour-long documentary film by French-Cambodian director Rithy Panh that is screened at the museum, an old lady who lost a daughter and son-in-law to Pol Pot's "socialist great leap forward," is perplexed. She says she cannot understand why the Khmer Rouge so ruthlessly broke up families. She said at age 70 she is supposed to know certain things, but that inhuman practice she cannot for the life of her figure out.

A younger female interviewee recalls how in the countryside communes friends and those few family members still together stopped trusting one another. Or people chose not to confide feelings or opinions because to do so might jeopardize not just their own lives but the lives of others. This same woman said "even the floors were listening" for rule breakers. Spies hid under the raised bamboo houses at night. One girl was overheard quietly singing a pre-revulutionary pop tune. She was taken out and killed that night, and her bloody clothes displayed at a "meeting," as a lesson to others.

We had lunch with the tuk-tuk driver we had hired for the day. Mr. Bora, a quiet, dignified man in shades and a baseball cap, spoke a little English. He told us he had lost both his parents and two brothers to the Khmer Rouge. He didn't say exactly how. When we asked him how he thought this thing could have happened, he shrugged and looked away.

After lunch, Mr. Bora drove us in his sputtering three-wheeler out to Choeung Ek and the Killing Fields Memorial. This is the orchard where nearly everyone who survived S-21 ended up after a few months. Walking around under a scorching sun, we saw the pits where the bodies of nearly 9,000 men, women and children have been exhumed, with thousands more still buried nearby. We saw the tree where loudspeakers were hung to mask the moans of those being bludgeoned or pick-axed to death. We saw the sturdy tree the executioners slammed the children against to finish them off. We saw the fragments of bone and clothing unearthed by the weather along the pathways. We saw the tall Memorial Stupa, where over 8,000 skulls are stacked on shelves behind glass, arranged by age and sex. Then we rode into the city, with its life and bustle and pleasant cafes along the Mekong esplanade.

Did Joe and I have to go and look at S-21 and Choeung Ek? Not really. We debated whether or not to go. And we would fault no one who came to Cambodia and said, yes, I know it happened, but I can't bear to get that close to it.

But we're glad now that we went. It's part of human history and that greatly interests us. It means, too, that we're somewhat more likely to be among those who notice if something like the Cambodian holocaust ever starts to happen again. What would we do if we did notice such a thing? We don't know. But we hope something.