Tuol Sleng (S-21)

The building at the corner of Street 113 and Street 350 in Phnom Penh was Tuol Svay Prey High School until 1975. When the Khmer Rouge took the city on April 17, 1975, they emptied it of students and converted it into Security Prison 21, known as S-21. The classrooms became cells. The exercise bars became gallows. The balconies were wrapped in barbed wire to prevent prisoners from jumping to their deaths.

The Process

Prisoners arrived hooded and shackled. They were photographed upon entry, producing the archive of over 6,000 mugshots that now cover the museum walls. They were chained to the floor in rows or locked in individual brick cells barely larger than a body. Interrogators tortured them until they confessed to working for the CIA, the KGB, or the Vietnamese, depending on what the interrogator had been told to extract. The confessions were fiction. The deaths were not.

The Numbers

Between 1975 and 1979, at least 12,000 people passed through S-21. Some estimates reach 20,000. Seven survived. The dead were taken to the Choeung Ek killing fields fifteen kilometers south, where they were executed with iron bars, hoes, and bamboo sticks to save ammunition. Mass graves at Choeung Ek have yielded over 8,000 skulls.

The Museum

When Vietnamese forces captured Phnom Penh in January 1979, they found fourteen bodies in the prison, the last victims, and the photographic archive. The building was converted into the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in 1980. The cells, the shackles, and the photographs remain as they were found.