was a high school--an irony perhaps not lost on leaders of the Pol Pot regime, many of whom were once teachers--before the Khmer Rouge army seized Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. Under the Khmer Rouge, Toul Sleng was a prison of the walking dead--those who needed to confess their sins against the Angkar (or Organization) before being put to death in the Killing Fields just outside of town.
The tales of brutality are well documented because the Angkar wanted to have "evidence" to justify their practices, so prisoners were photographed upon entry, and their testimonials, sometimes running hundreds of hand-written pages long, were kept on file. One prisoner, one of the few who made it out alive when the Vietnamese retook Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979, was kept alive so he could document life in the prisons through his paintings.
On my recent trip to what is now formally known as the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum, the details struck me the most. The holes chipped into the baseboards where the outer walls meet the floor. One author pointed out that they were punched out so that the blood and excrement could be more easily washed from the room. These little holes are omnipresent: in the cells, in the larger rooms, in the stairwells.
The chalkboards in some of the rooms remain a testament to the prison's former life as do the vast courtyards where children must have shrieked and scampered during recess. In the buildings, chains are still firmly stuck into the concrete flooring of the brick cells, the slapdash masonry of which attest to the quickness of their construction. A man can just stand akimbo, raise his hands into the air, and lie out flat in these cells. The wooden cells are a bit tighter, and it is only through pure chance that some have access to a barred window, or portion of one. Higher ranking officials who had fallen from grace were afforded larger rooms with metal beds, but the torture devices and apparatuses--and the shared fate of most of the inmates--are cold reminders that a larger cell must have been little comfort when the beatings, waterboarding, and finger-nail pulling finally ended late into the night.
As I stood in these cells, as I stared at the thousands of faces gazing back through time, as I peered out at the courtyards through the cross-section of razor wire that was meant to preclude suicide attempts, the greatest tragedy was that the story of Toul Sleng can never fully pass into the annals of history as long as it reminds us of the present. And that's perhaps the craziest thing to think of as you walk the halls and touch the chains: there are people today, right now as I write and as you read, who are suffering similar fates to the thousands-strong tortured souls of S-21.
The tales of brutality are well documented because the Angkar wanted to have "evidence" to justify their practices, so prisoners were photographed upon entry, and their testimonials, sometimes running hundreds of hand-written pages long, were kept on file. One prisoner, one of the few who made it out alive when the Vietnamese retook Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979, was kept alive so he could document life in the prisons through his paintings.
On my recent trip to what is now formally known as the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum, the details struck me the most. The holes chipped into the baseboards where the outer walls meet the floor. One author pointed out that they were punched out so that the blood and excrement could be more easily washed from the room. These little holes are omnipresent: in the cells, in the larger rooms, in the stairwells.
The chalkboards in some of the rooms remain a testament to the prison's former life as do the vast courtyards where children must have shrieked and scampered during recess. In the buildings, chains are still firmly stuck into the concrete flooring of the brick cells, the slapdash masonry of which attest to the quickness of their construction. A man can just stand akimbo, raise his hands into the air, and lie out flat in these cells. The wooden cells are a bit tighter, and it is only through pure chance that some have access to a barred window, or portion of one. Higher ranking officials who had fallen from grace were afforded larger rooms with metal beds, but the torture devices and apparatuses--and the shared fate of most of the inmates--are cold reminders that a larger cell must have been little comfort when the beatings, waterboarding, and finger-nail pulling finally ended late into the night.
As I stood in these cells, as I stared at the thousands of faces gazing back through time, as I peered out at the courtyards through the cross-section of razor wire that was meant to preclude suicide attempts, the greatest tragedy was that the story of Toul Sleng can never fully pass into the annals of history as long as it reminds us of the present. And that's perhaps the craziest thing to think of as you walk the halls and touch the chains: there are people today, right now as I write and as you read, who are suffering similar fates to the thousands-strong tortured souls of S-21.
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