Phnom Penh, Cambodia - Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum @ S-21 Prison

After our visit to the Killing Fields, it was time to delve deeper into the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime. It was another 45 minutes of sensory overload as our tuk-tuk weaved through the traffic back towards the city centre.

Our tuk-tuk dropped us on a narrow sidestreet flanked by restaurants on one side and high white walls on the other. Behind the walls stood a collection of buildings that used to be a high school before it was converted to the notorious high security S-21 prison by the Khmer Rouge. Now it looked drab and dreary and soul-less.

 I remember feeling anxious and nervous as I walked through the gates - not because of the small group of beggars either without a limb or with disfigured faces that was surrounding us, but because I have read so much about this place and was not sure whether I had the right expectations. We bought our tickets and then came to a grassy courtyard surrounded by four buildings. The frangipani trees looked out of place, beauty in a place which hold a thousand dark memories, where once screams and moans and silent prayers of liberation intermingled within the dense air.

The first of the four buildings was Building A, where the individual classrooms were converted into interrogation cells. These were preserved as they were left when the prison was discovered by the Vietnamese Army in 1979, sans the bodies and (most of) the blood of course. I went into the first cell carrying Snufkin. I saw  a solitary rusting iron bedframe in the middle of the room, on which decades ago a man was tortured to death. On a wall above the bedframe hung a framed black-and-white photo depicting a gory picture of a bloated and bloodied man, shackled and chained to the very same bed that I was seeing, already tortured beyond recognition. This I did not want Snufkin to see. I asked him to put his head on my shoulder and close his eyes.

I then caught sight of smudges of blood stains and bloodied handprints on the retro yellow wall. Standing in that room, the horror of what had happened was palpable.

Interrogation room

I was told all four floors of Building A was mostly filled with similar cells. I went into a few others on the ground floor but stopped myself from going to the upper floors. There was no way I was going up carrying Snufkin, or worse still, alone.

The barbed wire was apparently put up to prevent prisoners from committing suicide by jumping from the top floors

We went to Building B where the galleries of photos were. This was, to me, equally haunting. Rows upon rows of harrowing black-and-white photos of prisoners; men, women and children. In some of them, you could see the terror, confusion and fear in their eyes. Some stared at you blankly, some imploringly.

All prisoners of S-21 would have their photos taken

Some of the photos that continued to haunt me

Most of these people were no doubt tortured and killed not long after the photos were taken. These were the people on the verge of death. We let Snufkin look at the photos but after only a few minutes he was begging to go out. Even he could sense how depressing it was.  The courtyard outside was a lifesaver. Both of us took turns sitting with him on one of the benches under a tree. Next to us I saw a French family with 2 young girls, aged probably 6 and 8. They were the only children I saw throughout our visit there.

Without the barbed wire, it would have looked like Snufkin was playing outside a school

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That arrangement meant that I got to see the rest of the place without worrying if any of the exhibits would be unsuitable for Snufkin. And I think the pictures illustrating the methods of torture were a tad too graphic. I suppose it would not be easy to explain the concept of torture to little kids. The actual instruments of torture were also displayed and I marveled at the ingenuity of it all. 

Some of the torture equipmen

In another building, I saw rooms that were shoddily sub-divided into small cells for prisoners. They looked unfit even for animals. More smudges of blood stains on the wall.




Prisoners' cells

Rules and regulation of a concentration camp

There was a lot of things to see and documents to go through, especially in the last building. I would have loved to stay longer and to read more on the place and the history but I realised that I had an increasingly restless child parked in the courtyard. And in any case, the place felt so eerie that I did not dare to linger in rooms when there were no other vistitors.

I came to Cambodia with the primary purpose of seeing Angkor Wat. However, by the time that our short Cambodian trip was over, what left the most impact on me and what I remembered most were not the temples of Angkor, but the Tuol Sleng stories and the Cambodian genocide.

What I saw, read and heard in Cheoung Ek and Tuol Sleng stayed with me for months after I returned home to Malaysia. I felt disturbed. It did not help that I kept on wanting to know more. On top of the book First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung that I bought in Phnom Penh, I went on to buy the sequel After They Killed Our Father and The Elimination by Rithi Panh at Seam Reap Airport. We watched the movie The Killing Fields and also documentaries made by Rithi Panh and I trawled the net for stories by survivors of the regime. It was like Cambodian Month at our house.

I suppose the reason for my heightened interest could be due to the fact that it happened not too long ago. At that time, we were supposed to be already civilized. And those people who killed, maimed and tortured under the name of the Khmer Rougue - most of them are probably still alive...and free.

I learnt a lot from the visits. I learnt the meaning of an agrarian society, of the idealogy behind the whole madness. I also learnt that the depths of the darkness of the human hearts has no limit.

I realise that it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I still feel that the tourists to Cambodia who gravitated to Angkor Wat without putting Cheoung Ek and Tuol Sleng in their itineraries have not grasped the essence of the country. So go - don't let travelling with kids stop you.

Note:- 

Address: Street 113, Boeng Keng Kang 3, Chamkar Morn, ☎ +855 23 300-698, Admission fee: USD3, Opening hours: 8am - 5pm