The jail S-21

In 1975 the Tuol Svey Prey High School was taken over by Pol Pot's Securty Forces and turned into a security prison on Tuol Sleng ( literally :the poisonous hill)in the centre of Phnom Penh .This Prison 21, the most secret organ of the regime , known as S-21( Security office 21) soon became the largest torture centre in the country and during the 3 following years 17000 came there to be tortured to death sometimes ,( in witch case they would be buried right there on the school ground in a mass grave ) or anyway declared guilty and taken to the extermination camp at Choeung Ek . All the classrooms downstairs were divided into small cells , 0,8x2meters each and transformed in torture cells , all the windows enclosed by iron bars and covered with barbed wires. Up stairs the classrooms served as mass prison cells. Workers, farmers, engineers, technicians, artists, intellectuals, professors, teachers, students And often their family , including babies, were taken there between 2 to 4 months to be interrogated and tortured before being exterminated . They would be shackled with chains fixed to the wall or the concrete floor or their both legs shackled to long or short pieces of iron bar. The longest bar was 6 m and could held 30 prisoners sleeping on the cold floor all stripped of their underwear. They had to ask for permission to release themselves and defecate in small iron buckets then kept in the room. If not,if a single protest and they would be beaten sometimes to deah .
The regulations were clearly posted! SHUT UP. DON'T EVEN THINK OF ANSWERING ME BACK
The guards were often not more than 10 to 14 years old trained to grow increasingly evil. The medical personal .was most often as well made of untrained children
It is a museum today as a testament to the crimes of the Khmers Rouge(KR). As the Nazis, they like to keep track of their atrocities so they kept records and took many pictures before and after tortures and we can see hundreds of those pictures covering the walls from floor to ceiling . When the Vietnamese army finally liberated Phnom Penh in January 79 they found only 7 survivors in that S-21 jail , 14 others had been tortured to death that same day and left in the sun . Rusted beds and instruments of tortures are still in place and it is particularly depressing to realise it was a school ground where happy children were once running kicking a ball. .