Visions of Hell

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The ghosts of Pol Pot still visit Phnom Penh.

A visit to Phnom Penh is not complete without a visit to Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is situated in the former Tuol Svay Prey High School building that Pol Pot converted into a prison, torture, interrogation and extermination centre, which the Khmer Rouge renamed as "Security Prison 21" (S-21). Tuol Sleng is a Khmer name meaning "hill of the poisonous trees."

The former school buildings have been left largely as they were found by the Vietnamese in 1979. Only half a dozen bodies were found on the site and these bodies are buried on the site. As you tour the the first buiding, behind these graves, you are confronted with barred rooms containing metal beds with iron bars with U shape manacles attached. You learn later that long iron bars with U shaped manacles were how the prisoners were kept when not being torchured/interogated. Each room of these ground floor rooms has no plaque offering an explanation. On the wall there is a picture, indicating the situation the in which the room was found by the Vietnamese in 1979. Generally this indicated an emaciated body severly burned. The whelter of emotion that floods you is immence. Anyone who knows me knows that I do not have ready access to profound emotions but the presence and the obvious suffering that had gone on in this place had quickly moved me close to tears.

Around the corner in the ground second building there was a gallery of photographs. The photographs were taken by the Khmer Rouge of prisoners who had been interred in S-21. As you walk through the gallery the shere numbers and age range of the prisoners hit you. It is estimated that 17,000 prisoners passed through S-21. Of a known 14,200 prisoners only seven are known to have survived. S-21 was set up to extract confessions under the duress and then either to carry out summary executions or, more often, to ship the prisoners on to The Killing Fields (Choeung Ek) for execution. The expressions on the hundreds of faces vary from terror through to defiance. On the nineth panel there are just children! And there three or four rooms of these pictures!

On the top floor of the second building, the stories of some of the inmates and some of their captors are told. Simple heart rendering stories. And there is a visitors book. Difficult to put into words the overwhelming thoughts surging through one.

Downstairs and I'm sure there is still part of the museum to visit. I recall something a "skull map", but it has already got too much for me. Not prone to emotion, open or otherwise I can't hold it back any longer and sob openly in the former school courtyard. It brings it back again writing this now. You don't normally go out of your way to get upset when on holiday, but make an exception in this case. This place is too important not to visit if you are in Cambodia.

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Comments

[Laurie/Mum]

All in tears
You've almost brought tears to my eyes, Dave, just reading your account of Tuol Sleng. It brings back to mind my visit to an Italian(?) prison in Yugoslavia high in the coastal range of mountains behind Split. I was only 15 at the time. Even the sight of scratches on the wall marking off the passing of days in groups of ten is still vivid all these years later. You are never going to forget this harrowing experience. On a lighter note........I think you mean.........emaciated body.....rather than...........emancipated body !

[Jacky and John]

More visions of hell.
We had a similar experience visiting an underground hospital in Jersey of all places. This place was built by prisoners during Jersey's occupation during WW2.