Before the Khmer Rouge Tuol Sleng (nee Svay) was a high school during the regime it became the most nocuous of prisons and now the building houses a museum to the genocide. Classrooms were converted into torture chambers, halls into cells, all the windows were barred and the playgrounds covered in barbed wire and enclosed with an electrified fence. Inmates were mostly disgraced members of the Khmer Rouge arrested all over the country under the charge of spying, but there were also international prisoners and intellectuals all who were expected to confess to terrible crimes. The cruelty of Tuol Sleng is well documented, prisoners were forbidden to speak to each other, slept on bare floors, underfed, tortured unimaginably (waterboarding along with having fingernails pulled, given electric shocks, cut and burned) and beaten to within minutes of their lives. Around 20,000 people passed through, often leaving for the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek, there are only 12 known survivors. The museum was opened in 1980, just a year after the Khmer Rouge was brought down and simply displays instruments of torture, photographs of those who passed through (there was a large photography unit working within the prison) exerts of confessions and photographs of the prison as it was found in 1979.

Written by  Gerald Foe.

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