Toul Sleng Genocide Museum (S-21)

S21 is the infamous prison where almost 20,000 men, women and children were interned, tortured and sent to await death for supposedly being spies against the Khmer Rouge. The prisoners were kept in tiny cells with a metal box for a toilet, tortured until they named other supposed spies, and eventually taken to Choeung Ek killing field for execution. Only 4 people survived S21.

Today, the prison is the site of the Genocide Musuem. For $6 you can take a tour of the prison, or go on your own for cheaper. There is a documentary that is shown twice a day, and an exhibition of photographs of both prisoners and prison guards. People have written over and defaced all of the photos of the prison guards, in which you can see the pain that still lingers in a country that generally has only bright smiles for tourists to see. One of the four survivors was kept alive by painting pro-Khmer Rouge propaganda paintings; after he was freed he painted the true horrors of the prison, and these paintings are shown throughout the museum as well.

Visiting the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek was an impressive, but somewhat surreal experience. It was hard to imagine what the Killing Fields really looked like during the Khmer Rouge regime.
Well, what the Killing Fields lacked in realism, was made up for by the Tuol Sleng S-21 Prison Museum.

In 1975 the Khmer Rouge turned this high school into a prison, known as Security Prison 21 (S-21) and it was here where more than 17,000 people -including many Westerners- were tortured before being transported to extermination camps like Choeung Ek.

The appearance of the place hasn't changed much since Phnom Penh was liberated by the Vietnamese army in 1979. The only thing they changed were the bodies of the last 11 victims who had been murdered minutes before the Vietnamese arrived. Pictures of how the bodies had been found now grace the walls in the

This is by far the most gruesome and revolting place I have ever visited. It is not hard to imagine the atrocities that took place in this prison: the instruments of torture, the tiny cells, the thousands and thousands of pictures of men, women and children who had been tortured and murdered, all meticulously documented by the Khmer Rouge.

Though the floors have been cleaned, you can still see the stains created by the pools of blood on the floor. In the cells you can see the scratches on the walls and doors made by the fingernails of prisoners clawing at the doors in desperation.
It is a horrible, horrible place, but also a very important piece of history, as it shows the darkest side of humanity, and what people are capable of under the right circumstances.

I visited this museum as part of a day-tour, and the next stop was a local market where we could go shopping or have some food. After visiting this museum shopping and food were the last things on my mind.

No, it's not going to be a pretty visit. This humble little city school was once the scene of unbelievable brutality - torture and death and around 20,000 people were murdered here: so a visit brings you face to face with humanity. The scene is quiet, contemplative, and preserved just as it was in the 1970s when Pol Pot's young soldiers - many were just teenagers with machine guns - rounded up citizens on the slightest pretext. For wearing glasses. (Sign of intellectual.) For averting your eyes the wrong way. For...for everything and nothing. Then, taken here, victims were imprisoned, tortured to confess to sins they never committed - and photographed before being executed.

The heart of this museum is the colleciton of photos - old people, young, some of them just kids - with numbers pinned to their chests. They stare at you, some blank, some defiant - all of them going through unimaginable horror.

There is also a video documentary that is worth seeing.

When I was there a group of us, from the UK, USA and NZ just sat there sobbing. As one of the group said: "How could the rest of the world let this happen?"

But come here. Do it to honour the victims and remember them. Do it to learn about yourself.

A visit to Tuol Sleng Museum is a shocking experience, displaying the most evil forces humans are capable of portraying. Yet I would recommend anyone to visit this museum. It gives you a deep insight into the troubled recent history of Cambodia.

Tuol Sleng (means poison hill) is a primary school in Phnom Penh that became S-21 a notorious concentration camp for the Khymer Rouge regime. I noticed sign that said “genocide museum” on the main road and turned down a small lane to the front gate. From the outside it didn’t look very out of the ordinary, just a regular old school with rusty barbwire on the fence, if it weren’t for the sign on the gate I would have walked past it. I went in and took a pamphlet, no one asked me to pay so I turned right and went on.
The first thing I noticed was some graves in the courtyard. The first building to the right was probably the administration building. In each of the four rooms were a steel bed, a leg manacle, and ammunition box. On the wall was a large picture of a dead tortured person manacled to the bed. Apparently the graves in the courtyard held the bodies of these last victims, killed only hours before the Vietnamese discovered the place, the rooms were left as they were. This was a grim enough introduction but worse horrors were to come.
Out in the exercise ground was an extra tall and sturdy pull-up bar under this was a large earthenware urn full of muddy rainwater. The illustration and board explained that this was used to torture prisoners. The prisoners had their hands bound behind their backs and hung up the bar by their hands causing their shoulders to dislocate. They were then brought down and half-drowned in putrid liquids in the urn.
The next building in the center of the school was the interrogation house and had a large haunting display of mug shots of prisoners and guards. The Khymer Rouge didn’t have enough time to destroy their meticulous documentation of their crimes in the face of an oncoming Vietnamese invasion. It was a weird feeling to see the faces of all these people who would never be seen again and who would end their lives in the worst possible ways. Men, women, children, old, young, even a westerner, and a couple of Indians, they are now just a staring face on the display boards. The guards were a mere rabble of juveniles, it’s amazing how easily children, when trained, can do the most heinous acts. The reasoning of the KR was that children are pure of decadent west poison so they are qualified to sniff out treason. Much like Mao’s Red Guard of the Cultural Revolution and most Communist/totalitarian regimes they were quick to realize that people are not born with morals, these are taught, and their natural conscience, which stops excess, can be desensitized to uselessness. On display were the crude instruments of torture, there was nothing sophisticated with these impovised farm implements.Wire whips, pick axe handles, iron bars etc to use these against innocent chained humans is something only heavily conditioned/controlled (by fear, mob behaviour, ideology, mind control etc,) or innately sadistic/mentally ill people can do. Paintings on the wall by one of the survivors show the hellish conditions and cruel tortures in graphic detail. The waterboarding devise was a metal bench and oil drum.
The next building had the cells, one large hall must have held hundreds of prisoners. They were all made to lie prone packed like sardines each prisoner’s ankle was manacled to an iron rebar. It’s impossible to imagine the agony endured in that place, the pain that sunk down in the worn clay tiles. With the intense tropical humidity they wore only underwear to survive, their skin was diseased with close contact and poor hygiene. Metal ammunition cases served as toilets, they were never unshackled. The verandah and windows were enclosed with rusty barbwire.
The upper levels had the solitary confinement cells. Walking down the narrow corridor with dark closet-like wooden cells on both sides was a ghastly horror, the atmosphere was heavy and oppressive. The brick cells were much the same, grim and dungeon-like, the walls must have echoed the screams of its enclosed victims. Now there was only a deathly silence broken only by the faint laughs of squatters playing volleyball behind the school.
I finished my tour with a room of pictures and biographic material about the victims and torturers in this place. About 17,000 people entered the gate as detainees only 12 survived. The last room had a display case of browning skulls piled in a heap the skulls had holes and cracks in the craniums. A painting showed how most of the detainees ended their lives at the “killing fields” the blindfolded victims were lined up and their brains dashed out with a wood ox cart axle. It was now late afternoon and the shadows became long and eerie.
I had enough of the inhumanity of man. Another glimpse into the primordial instincts of man and where they led, Maoist and atheistic socialism is yet another of the ideologies of destruction, pain, and hate. I walked away with a sick feeling and a heavy heart. How could this all be done in the name of improving society? When you take away all restraints and turn social order and authority on its head you get these crimes time and again. If there is no God then in the end man only has to answer to man and only the powerful men survive.

And then it was off to the Tuol Sleng Museum, or Security Prison 21 (S21) where the Khmer Rouge had detained and tortured 17.000 people before ending their lives at the Killing Fields we visited yesterday. You might think that seeing the Killing Fields would prepare you for S21. Well, think again. Nothing can prepare you for such absolute inhumanity and terror and I can easily say that this was the most shocking thing I have ever seen in my life. I've was walking around feeling fits of nausea and utter despair at what people are seemingly capable of.
The Khmer Rouge had a very efficient way of administrating their doings at S21. Every prisoner got a number when he or she came in and was photographed with the date on which they were brought to the Killing Fields. People who died at S21 during torture were also photographed. One of the building sections is filled with row upon row of photo's of the prisoners deported. Thousands of people. Innocent people who were killed just because they were (thought to be) intellectuals (e.g. if they wore glasses) or opponents of the regime. Man, women and children.

And if this wasn't enough madness, another section of the buildings was reserved as 'VIP rooms' (as our guide Sophie called them). This is where high ranking Khmer Rouge officials that had been detained and tortured in the 'privacy of their own room'. Seemingly nobody was save from the Khmer Rouge, not even their own people. When Phnom Penh was liberated by the Vietnamese in 1979 the liberators took pictures which are displayed in these VIP rooms. It shows the people being horribly tortured while chained to the beds. The only other object in the room besides the matressless bed was a small metal box which proved to be a toilet. As if all of this wasn't horrible enough, the walls and ceilings (!) still showed traces of blood.

Another building was filled with tiny little cells of brick or wood. The balconies of this building were blocked by barbed wire to ensure that the prisoners couldn't commit suicide by jumping off. The cells themselves measured one by two meters. The two most moving moments for me where a big picture of a woman with a baby and the 'guestbook'. The woman in the picture had been the wife of a high ranking Khmer Rouge official, but for some reason she and her baby had been killed in S21 anyway. A tear was rolling down her cheek.

I almost didn't notice the guestbook. It was lying on a chair on one of the floors of a building where paintings of the horrible tortures were on exhibition. I opened it and it turned out to be filled with remarks of visitors of the museum, in many different languages. As you can imagine these remarks were very, very emotional. They echoed and strengthened my own feelings and filled my eyes with tears.

I'll not go into all of the gruesome ways of torture that the Khmer Rouge had invented and which were displayed in the pictures and paintings. Suffice it to say that it's beyond my understanding that a human being can think of something like that and actually bring it into practice. The biggest mystery is perhaps the question 'why?'. What on earth did they have to gain from these unspeakable acts? Again I left another 'highlight' of the journey in a state of shock.

As with the Killing Fields, a visit to S21 is essential to understanding the history of Cambodia and experiencing the utter cruelty that the human race is capable of. Utterly depressing but highly recommended.