Tuol Sleng Prison Museum

While the Killing Fields yesterday were difficult to see, experience, understand, today we visited the prison where people (the elite, intellectuals, rich, city-folk) were detained and tortured for up to a week before taken to the Killing Fields for execution. Tung Sleng Prison, better known as S 21, was once a primary school transformed by the Khmer Rogue into a prison.

When trying to imagine even relive such hideous acts of human nature, it is much more tangible, human and devastating an experience having another person share his or her own story with you while you attempt to take it all in. Today, our guide was in her mid 40s. She had personally been held in a children's camp outside of the city during the Khmer Rouge, from age 10 to 13. From what she said, people were happy with Pol Pot's ideas at first, that the city and countryside would again be united, the rich and poor given equal opportunity and options. But in reality, city life and those in it were decimated. Taken out of the city, separated from her entire family, uncertain where they were, if even alive, hearing her story put a face, an individual experience to the horror. Prisoners were fed two spoonfuls of porridge three times daily, tortured twice a day. Within a week's time, none were able to stand. All in all, it didn't much matter, from what she said. The prisoners were sent to the Killing Fields to be exectued shortly thereafter, left in a mass grave. The cells were hardly three feet wide, many of which still have spots and smears of blood in them.

As you walk through the prison, you are met with the faces of those massacred. Soldiers were required to photgraph every person admitted upon arrival, as much for prisoner identification as for proof to Pol Pot that the soldiers were doing their jobs of bringing people in. A number assigned to each person daily, sometimes over 700 people were admitted in a day. The photographs of the prisoners fill the rooms that were once their torture chambers. Men, women, children. In some of the photos the people are smiling. They had no idea for what they are headed. It's horrible.

After the Vietnamese invaded and liberated the country, seven of those who had been held in the prison survived. A sculptor, two painters, one translator, two mechanics and an eletrical engineer, only a very few whose particular knowledge or skills had proved beneficial to the Khmer Rouge had been spared. Our guide shared with us her feelings upon being set free. She said all she could do was put her hands together in front of her chest in the sign of prayer, thinking, 'Please, let me find my mother...please, let her be alive.' Our guide's father was killed, as well as two brothers and a sister. She lives with her mother to this day. The prison requests that you give a donation to your guide, depending on your experience and what you think reasonable. Our guide put the money we gave her in the donation box at the ticket entrance. I wish she'd taken it herself but hope that whatever ends up in that box truly does go to help a country of survivors.