The notorious S-21 prison in Phnom Penh has been turned into a Genocide Museum cataloguing one of the atrocities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

Portraits of torturers covered with angry graffiti. 
In one wing each room has only a metal bed, artifacts such as cartridge cases and leg irons, and a large blowup photo of the dead and mutilated person that the Vietnamese found shackled to each bed when they arrived. Gruesome even in black and white, they are stained with yellow, decomposing like the rooms.The courtyard, with the school arranged in a U-shape around it, was once a playground I suppose, but now holds the graves of these last dead prisoners.

Some of the rooms still have the old high school blackboards on them, one with writing on it. A man tells me that the writing is current, not from the era of Pol Pot. He translates, ‘I (am) full (not hungry); you (are) right; you (impolite) are cruel.’
He is here with his nephew – the boy of about 15 with bright eyes and a cell phone in his pocket which keeps ringing – several times he disappears to chat with his friends.

A story of sadness. The next wing contains many cells, with openings chipped out to allow passage from one room to the next. The last room has rows of leg irons and a metal cage containing busts of Pol Pot – a rather benign-looking man – he reminds me of Hua, our driver in Siem Reap. Of the seven survivors of the prison most were artists, kept alive so they could make paintings and sculptures like these glorifying Pol Pot.

While we are standing there a group of Cambodians come into the room. A woman spots the cage containing the busts and kicks it so hard the room rings with the sound of condemnation. She is crying angrily as her friends pull her away.

Legacy of Pol Pot.In July of 2007 Duch, Pol Pot’s chief interrogator, was charged with crimes against humanity. Duch was the first of Pol Pot’s senior ‘cadres’ to be charged and was best known as the person who ran the Toul Sleng S-21 prison.

The tiny man in the hat is Bou Meng, one of only seven survivors of the prison. He was being filmed by an Australian film crew to mark the fact that Duch had finally been charged. It was almost 30 years after his crimes had been committed during the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror that ran from 1975 to 1979.The crew kept asking him to remove his hat as the shadows obscured his face but he kept putting it back on. The short film made in 2007 of this man, Bou Meng, one of the few survivors of the prison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj1EKXg3Duo.

The Gate by François Bizot

An ethnobotanist working in Cambodia at the time of Khmer Rouge, Bizet tells of being a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge who travels with the cadres on his way to prison. This is the story of his intellectual relationship with his captor Duch, one of Pol Pot’s regime’s most vicious killers.