lines and light

 

I'm not sure what to tell you about Tuol Sleng, or S-21 as it was called by the Khmer Rouge. This is the school which the Khmer Rouge turned into a detention centre and used to torture and kill about 20,000 of the two million or more people that were killed all together.

I knew a smattering of Cambodian history before I came here but it did nothing to prepare me for this. I walked into the first room I came to and nearly walked straight out again. The room was filled with tiny cubicles, the partitions hastily built out of brick. On the floor of each cubicle was fixed a set of chains, and in some of them what looked like a petrol can and a long tin box. They were instruments of torture, left right where they were last used. I felt like I'd just walked into hell.

The rooms kept on going and going. I couldn't face them all. The last rooms we went into were the ones where hundreds of photographs of the deceased were on display . Every single person brought here was photographed. Their faces, blank with fear, shouted at me. They were all somebody's son, somebody's daughter. So many of them were children. One of the photographs showed a woman cradling her sleeping baby in her arms. She was sitting in an execution chair so horrific and depraved that I can't bring myself to describe it. The photo was taken a moment before she was killed. What happened to her baby?

These photos of mine don't tell you anything, except that taking photos was my therapy at Tuol Sleng. When I felt like the horror was going to eat me up I looked for the lines and the light. In the end I would have walked away before I'd even gone into the rooms with the photographs, if it wasn't for the holding cross I'd bought earlier that day. We'd been to the Peace cafe, a beautiful cafe and shop run to support Banteay Prieb (Centre of the Dove), a vocational training centre for Cambodians with physical disabilities run by the Jesuit Service. I unpacked that cross when I didn't think I could take any more, and walked through the last rooms holding it and turning it anxiously.

Tuol Sleng was left pretty much as it was when the Vietnamese Army finally overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979. You can see it gets swept occasionally, but that's about it. There was a chair sitting facing a wall in one of the upstairs rooms, and one of the blackboards still had the faint chalk marks of a french lesson. The floors are filthy, covered with years of dust and grime and blood turned rusty brown.