Tuol Sleng / Choeung Ek

In 1975, the Ponhea Yat High School in Phnom Penh was taken over by the Khmer Rouge and turned into a prison known as Tuol Sleng, or S-21. The school had a large selection of plain classrooms with brown and white checkered tiles on the floor, and a green playing area. It became the largest centre of detention and torture in the country. Between the years of 1975 and 1978 more than 17,000 people were held at the prison before being sent to the extermination camp at Choeung Ek. From all of these prisoners there were 7 survivors.

Each of the classrooms at Tuol Sleng were converted into prison cells. All windows were enclosed by iron bars, and covered with tangled barbed wire. The ground and first floor classrooms were divided into small cells, 0.8 x 2.0 metres each and made from either rough bricks or wood. Each cell held a single prisoner who was chained to the floor. The rooms on the top floors were used as mass prison cells, in which rows of prisoners were made to lie on the floor and their legs were shackled to a long metal bar. Interrogations were done in a neighbouring building. All prisoners were required to ask permission to do anything at all, even change position while trying to sleep, and to follow a list of regulations at all times. Anyone breaking the rules was severely beaten or tortured by a variety of methods, including having their fingernails removed with pliers, then their fingers dunked in vinegar.

Over 1,720 people worked in the S-21 complex over the three years of its operation. A number of these were children aged 10 to 15, who were trained and selected by the Khmer Rouge regime to work as guards. In time, these children became some of the most ruthless and cruel of all the workers at S-21. Eventually, as the revolution continued, many of the prison guards, torturers, executioners and even high-level party cadres themselves were imprisoned and killed as they were seen as posing a threat to the regime.

Every prisoner who passed through S-21 was photographed, providing the only record of the thousands who were killed in this period.

At Choeung Ek (out of town, down a peaceful red dirt road lined with white Eucalypts, where today kids fly kites and buffalo graze in water-logged rice fields) tens of thousands of people were bludgeoned to death with the handles of farm equipment. Their throats were then cut, and they were pushed into mass graves, only some of which have since been exhumed. Walking around the green, empty pits today, you step on and over half buried fragments of bone, and bits of cloth. Dragonflies swarm in the humid air. A silence, but for the wind and the distant giggle of children over the fence. Small piles of femurs rest at the base of trees, accompanied by pots of burnt incense.

In three years the Khmer Rouge killed between two and three million people in prisons, toture chambers and extermination camps just like this one, all over the country.


Sometimes it is entirely impossible to comprehend human beings.