  Photos taken before execution at Tuol Sleng Prison |
PHNOM PENH
City of Loss
Tuol Sleng Museum
Tuol Sleng was a school before the Khmer Rouge turned the classrooms into torture chambers and converted it into one of the regime's most infamous death camps. The curator of Tuol Sleng Museum, Chey Sopheara, went to school here as a child. Now he's taking Adam and me on a tour of the site.
It's jarring to visit Tuol Sleng today. The former prison is located in the heart of a bustling suburb. It's rimmed by apartment buildings -- you almost miss the barbed wire as you walk by. In front of the gates, it's business as usual. An enterprising man has set up a cart that holds a portable station to cut keys. A phalanx of one-legged beggars prowl for the handful of foreign tourists who come here. On the day we visit, canned music is blaring from a Cambodian wedding next door.
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Chey shows us where the roof is collapsing and the walls are starting to cave in. Black rags that look like old prison uniforms lie in forgotten piles. He shakes his head and quietly explains through a translator that the museum doesn't have the funds for repairs. He takes us into the main records room, where the evidence recovered from the prison is stored. It's so dark we can barely film. He shrugs and apologizes -- the museum can't pay the electricity bill.
He takes down a box at random and slowly leafs through one of the thousands of documents that the Khmer Rouge left behind. He reads from the forced confession of Mom Tip, a doctor, one of the estimated 14,000 people who were imprisoned here. Only eight are known to have survived Tuol Sleng. Mom Tip is not one of them.
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The Khmer Rouge targeted anyone who was educated, which was most likely Mom Tip's "crime." His penciled confession is written in a child's primer with a cartoon of a happy student on the cover. The booklet -- this man's last testament -- is already starting to disintegrate. The neat careful writing is fading, and the delicate paper is crumbling from the heat and the bugs. "I'm very worried that if we don't do anything to fix this now, in the next 10 or 20 years all the evidence will be gone," Chey says. "If we don't maintain what we have here, such as these documents, one day such a horrible thing will happen again."
The halls of Tuol Sleng are lined with thousands of haunting photographs of the prisoners who were tortured and executed here. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records of their victims. Before prisoners were killed, they were photographed. These photographs are the most indelible images of the atrocities. Old men, young women, even children as young as 2 or 3 stare back from the black and white portraits. Each photograph was proof that Tuol Sleng had received the prisoner and was intended to convince leaders that all the enemies of the regime were being found and "smashed," as the Khmer Rouge put it.
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Nhem En says that he knew most everyone he was photographing would be executed. "As a Buddhist, I felt pity for them," he tells us. "But I could not help -- if I did, I would not survive." In a familiar refrain, he says he was not guilty of any crimes because "I was just following organizational orders." He even says that the current government should thank him for his work at the death camp. "Without those pictures, how could we know what happened at that time?"
Half of Cambodia's population is too young to remember the genocide, and the stories they hear from parents are so horrific they sound like nightmarish fairy tales or overblown stories of the bogeyman -- be good or the Khmer Rouge will get you. Most children don't learn about the Khmer Rouge in school, so they have only rumors to go on. Chey says that even his own sons don't believe the scope of the atrocities. He brought them here once. "They were shocked," he says. "They asked, 'Why? It's so horrible, maybe it's not true ... Why did they kill people? For what reason? It's not believable.'"
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Chey asks us to pass on a message to Americans "for funds to renovate this building and to maintain the documents so that the young generation will be educated and this will not happen again."
Later that night, in our hotel, we're looking over the day's footage from Tuol Sleng and the true scope of the atrocities starts to hit home. As we fast-forward through the tape, the faces of the victims come up in the viewfinder, one after another -- mother, soldier, child -- like an indictment.
NEXT: PREY TA TAUCH: The Killer Next Door
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