Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

The museum has chilling displays of torture items as well as rooms room of photographs of the victims. Combined with a visit to the Choeung Ek Killing Fields its a gut-wrenching experience, but one essential to understanding Cambodia.

Tuol Sleng Prison is a museum designed not only to educate all Khmer and international visitors, but also, and more importantly, to commemorate the tens of thousands of brutally murdered victims of the Khmer Rouge during its 1970’s mission of cleansing and rebuilding a society based on an obedient and ignorant classless collective.

Tuol Sleng commemorates those murdered and buried at the site as well as photographs of the many faces who did not make it out alive. The heart wrenching photographs even include the occupation of the fallen, many of whom were targets based on their profession. Not as much detail for the numerous children.

Tuol Sleng educates the visitors by employing emotional imagery through painting, photography, and a film. Even more haunting, through the cells and torture you can wonder through the makeshift cells and torture chambers. The gallows in the courtyard tell of the methods used to interrogate victims who had to answer impossible questions in a game which they could never win.

Tuol Sleng was a former school-cum-prison, known as Security Prison 21 (S-21) during the Khmer Rouge years (1975 to 1979), that was used to torture and extract information out of people. Hundreds of cells were built of brick and mortar, distorting former classrooms into chambers where thousands of people were tormented.

In all, around 30,000 people went through the gates of the S-21 prison, were tortured, and subsequently slain nearby in the Killing Fields. Only seven survived, one of whom saved himself because of his portrait painting skills; there are now murals depicting the atrocities he witnessed.

Guides, many of whom suffered under the regime, are available to take you through the grounds or you may walk on your own. I recommend taking a guide because their narratives are an important, living, part of the story. There words are also a reminder that genocide is not a thing of the past.