Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (28 page)

Who could decide, and what did it matter, to the interrogators at least, when being “absolute” shaded into being “excessive”?

The cruelties committed at S-21 and at its killing field at Choeung Ek fi neatly into what Kelman and Hamilton, drawing on the work of Stanley Milgram and others, have called “crimes of obedience.” The interrogators at S-21 who tortured prisoners and the people charged with executing them responded, instinctively or not, to orders given by people whose authority they accepted without question, in part because questioning that authority could have led to their own deaths. Zygmunt Bauman, writing about the Holocaust, suggests that “moral inhibitions against violent atrocities tend to be eroded” when violence is authorized and routinized and when the victims are dehumanized. Tzvetan Todorov holds a similar view.
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Moreover, when they hurt and killed people, many of the interrogators at S-21, and the executioners at

Choeung Ek, thought that they were answering to a higher level of morality and a more encompassing discipline than they had ever encountered before. Isolated, bonded, terrified, yet empowered, these young men soon became horrific weapons. The pleasures they derived from cruelty, in some cases, enhanced their satisfaction from surviving at the prison and gaining and holding their superiors’ approval.

Many of them were pleased to serve the revolution as it was embodied by their superiors and the unseen “upper brothers.”
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To borrow terms from Maoist China, as they gradually became “expert,” the interrogators remained entirely “red.” They would probably have agreed with the Chinese Red Guard who wrote: “It is a small matter to beat someone to death, but it is very important to conduct revolution, to uproot resistance, to preserve redness.”
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In the Cambodian case, to be sure, the revolution eventually collapsed, “resistance” sprang up everywhere, and “redness” was discredited. Years later, we are left, as the survivors are, with the echoes and shadows of “excessive violence.” We encounter them as we leaf through confession dossiers or scan a stack of mug shots where people look imploringly or angrily at the people taking their pictures and, long after their own executions, imploringly or angrily at us. All these scraps of paper—photographs, memoranda, rosters, statistics, and confessions—emit images and approximations of the hubris, pain, fear, and malodorous confusion that made up the everyday culture and the everyday horror of S-21.

Images of S-21

We may get a little closer to what “really happened” when we visit the Museum of Genocidal Crime. Judy Ledgerwood, who worked at Tuol Sleng for many months on the Cornell microfilming project, has written,

Over time, one begins to see the details. On stairway landings, for example, holes have been knocked in the wall so the stairs can be cleaned by sloshing water down the staircases. Below each of these openings on the building exterior one can still see stains of the blood that ran down the sides, as if the buildings themselves had bled.
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As we draw near to the prison in passages like this, brushing against its walls, we come a little closer to “reading” what happened there on a daily basis. Some of our readings bring us closer than others. Scattered phrases, an interrogator’s doodle, or a prisoner’s expression in a mug shot can illuminate the whole experience of the prison in a fl

although such “illuminations” vary from one person to the next. For me, it was a statement of Nhem En’s that brought the routine horror of the prison suddenly to life. Talking with Douglas Niven, En was asked about his “most frightening memory” of S-21. He replied:

What made me really scared was when I saw the trucks loaded with people and they shoved the people off the trucks and then pushed them when they hit the ground. I was still young and it scared me. These people were blindfolded and their hands were tied behind them.
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By contrast, when prisoners were taken off from S-21 to be killed, they were lifted one at a time onto the trucks, like pets or children. “They couldn’t get onto the trucks themselves,” Him Huy told Peter Maguire, “because the trucks were too high.”

Nearly all the killings took place in secret and at night. In 1976, Kok Sros recalled, blindfolded prisoners were clubbed to death with iron bars in the field immediately to the west of the compound. They were buried where they fell, in shallow graves that measured only 1.5 meters deep. Although the killings were never openly discussed, the smell of decomposing bodies, mingled with the stench of feces and urine, was overwhelming.
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“Smashing Enemies” at Choeung Ek

During 1977, when purges intensified, the facility at S-21 filled up, and so did the impromptu cemetery nearby. At some point in 1977 a Chinese graveyard near the hamlet of Choeung Ek, fi kilometers southwest of the capital, was put into service as a killing field, although important prisoners continued to be executed on the prison grounds. Located near a dormitory for Chinese economic experts, the site was equipped with electric power to illuminate the executions and to allow the guards from the prison to read and sign the rosters that accompanied prisoners to the site. This was where the prisoners Nhem En saw were sent to be “smashed” or “discarded.” After the site was discovered in 1980, it was transformed under Vietnamese guidance into a tourist site where even today scraps of bones and clothing can be found near the excavated burial pits.
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Kok Sros and Him Huy have conflicting memories about the killings. Kok Sros claims that he never went to Choeung Ek. Him Huy admits to driving trucks full of prisoners to the site on several occasions and to

performing “one or two” executions there himself. According to Kok Sros and Nhem En, interviewed months apart, by 1978 Him Huy was a seasoned killer, an important figure at the prison and a key participant in the execution process. Vann Nath, shown his photograph in 1996, concurred. In 1978, according to Kok Sros, Him Huy often chose the execution teams, which were made up of “men who were able to do anything.” Those without previous experience of killing prisoners were not selected, and the executioners never talked about the killings. On many occasions, Kok Sros had to bring prisoners from their cells to the assembly point just outside the prison gates. “When the prisoners heard they were to be taken away,” he said, “they tried to break their locks and struggle with the guards”—to no avail. Soon they were packed into trucks and, in Kok Sros’s words, taken “away to the west”—in Khmer mythology, the direction of death.

Him Huy’s description of the killings at Choeung Ek, repeated with variations in several interviews, is the only fi account that we have so far. What follows is drawn from these interviews, which took place between 1987 and 1997.

The number of prisoners executed at Choeung Ek on a daily basis varied from a few dozen to over three hundred. The latter figure was recorded in May 1978, at the height of the purges in the Eastern Zone. Normally, “once a month, or every three weeks, two or three trucks” would go from S-21 to Choeung Ek. Each truck held three or four guards and twenty to thirty “frightened, silent” prisoners. When the trucks arrived at the site, Huy recalls, the prisoners were assembled in a small building where their names were verified against an execution list prepared beforehand by Suos Thi, the head of the documentation section. A few execution lists of this kind survive. Prisoners were then led in small groups to ditches and pits that had been dug earlier by workers stationed permanently at Choeung Ek. Him Huy continued, with an almost clinical detachment:

They were ordered to kneel down at the edge of the hole. Their hands were tied behind them. They were beaten on the neck with an iron ox-cart axle, sometimes with one blow, sometimes with two. . . . Ho inspected the killings, and I recorded the names. We took the names back to Suos Thi. There could not be any missing names.

Him Huy remembers prisoners crying out, “Please don’t kill me!” and
“Oeuy!
” (my beloved). He recalls telling one prisoner whom he knew that if he didn’t kill him as ordered he would be killed himself. Asked if

he felt “sadness or fear” when he was at Choeung Ek, Him Huy replied, “No, but I sometimes thought, ‘I ought to run away from this, but if I ran where would I run to, and where could I go without a weapon? If I had a weapon and a vehicle to drive. . . . I thought about it a lot in those days.’”

Killing people he had worked with in S-21 was particularly difficult for him, and before they died, he said, these victims “could see how sad I was.” When the prisoners were dead, he remembered on another occasion, some of their bodies were stripped of useful items of clothing. Female corpses were not stripped.

When we deal with the culture of S-21, it is tempting to rush to judgment, but it is also easy to judge the interrogators, guards, or executioners too severely. They could disobey orders only on pain of death. Without similar experiences, temptations, and pressures it is impossible for any of us to say how we might have behaved had we been interrogators ourselves, locked in a cell facing a helpless and devalued “enemy” alongside a pair of colleagues, either of whom might report us to the authorities for failing to inflict torture or for “counterrevolutionary” hesitation. Similarly, we cannot say what we would have done at Choeung Ek if a superior gave us an iron bar with which to smash the skull of a kneeling victim. Faced with so many threats and ambiguities, did the torturers and killers hesitate, barge ahead, or make choices on a case-by-case basis? No refusals to inflict torture or to execute prisoners have surfaced in the archive. Once prison personnel began to torture people, it seems, they were too callous, bonded, empowered, or terrified to stop or question what they were doing. Few constraints came from those above them, from the victims, or from others in their teams. The real horror of S-21 may lie outside the violence itself, embedded in the administrators’ indifference and the indifference of the Party Center to what they were doing to other human beings. In a sense, some of the people who were tortured at Tuol Sleng may have been fortunate not to have survived, if we consider the continuous, traumatic aftereffects of torture that afflict so many of its victims and that led many survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, for example, to kill themselves long after they had been set free.
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Similar sad endings awaited many of the people who were humiliated and attacked in the Chinese Cultural Revolution; perpetrators, as a class, seem to be more thick-skinned.

Two examples of such victims may suffice. Jean Améry, a prominent Jewish intellectual in postwar Europe and a survivor of Auschwitz,

committed suicide in 1978. His friend and contemporary at Auschwitz, Primo Levi, threw himself out of his own apartment in Turin a decade later. In his eloquent short book,
At the Mind’s Limits,
Améry may have foreshadowed his own death while describing torture when he wrote:

Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured . . . anyone who has suffered torture will never again be at ease in the world; the abomination of the annihilation is never extinguished. Faith in humanity, already cracked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again.
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chapter six

Explaining S-21

Knowing what we do about a “total institution” like S-21 that poignantly embodied and fastidiously documented so much terror and history in the service of a desperate, inept regime, how can we explain what happened there in terms that might be useful to survivors, historians, and readers?

This chapter attempts to answer this question. By taking a more detached view of what happened at S-21, I do not intend to minimize the cruelties inflicted at the prison or the criminality of the Party Center. The preceding chapters have documented the crimes against humanity that occurred at S-21. But there is more to understanding S-21 than merely condemning it as evil. Trying to figure out what happened within its walls, how, and why is more fruitful, I believe, than passing judgment and moving on.

Comparisons have frequently been made between S-21 and the Nazi extermination camps in World War II. Writers who have examined the Nazi camps illuminate the culture of obedience that suffuses total institutions and the numbing dehumanization that occurs, among perpetrators and victims alike, within their walls. Studies of the Holocaust also bring us face to face with the indifference that the Nazis, like the Cambodians, showed their victims, coupled in some cases with the pleasure they derived from causing pain.
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The same callousness toward “guilty people” and similar bursts of sadism characterized, among others, the judges in the Moscow show trials in the 1930s, the perpetrators of mas-