Toul Sleng: The Genocide Museum

We have a long lunch at a hotel (another Boddhi Tree) opposite Toul Sleng, the Genocide Museum. I considered moving to this hotel , but Toro advised me against it, telling me it wasn’t safe. I learned later that the locals believe the street and area to haunted by ghosts. In Khmer culture, a person does not receive a proper funeral after death becomes a ghost, and many died in Toul Sleng (14 or 20,000, depending on which side of the museum you are on).

The lunch is long, perhaps purposefully so. Finally, we enter the museum. Toul Sleng was a high school in Phnom Penh before the Khmer Rouge converted it to S-21, a military prison, interrogation and torture facility. The presentation is minimalist and effective: we walk into room after room, each with a rusty bed (no mattress) a decaying and empty box of machine gun shells, and a picture on the wall of a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge regime, post-torture.

Each room has the same set-up but with a different picture. The tiled floors in some of the rooms have dark splotches, which aren’t explained.

In another room, we walk through bulletin boards of photographs. The faces of the victims are familiar, I can almost see my Cambodian co-workers and friends on these walls.

The most effective exhibit is a display of narrative stories of Khmer Rouge soldiers, cadres (poor and illiterate people who were given political positions), and victims.

The brutality and paranoia of the regime are mind-boggling. The hubristic grandness of Pol Pot’s vision is stunning: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge believed that they could entirely remake Cambodian society (start over from the Year Zero) and return Cambodia to a collectivist agricultural commune.