"You must not cry at all"

Outside the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, tuk tuk drivers leaning on their vehicles laugh with each other, tourists sip mint iced tea at sidewalk restaurants, and young Khmer men in T-shirts with “Playboy” and the iconic bunny ears printed on the back whiz by on their motorcycles. Inside the museum are black and white photos that show a different Phnom Penh of empty streets and ruined buildings.

Soon after taking control of Phnom Penh in April of 1975, the Khmer Rouge, desperate to re-figure Cambodia into an idealistic agrarian community, had the city evacuated under the false pretense that the United States was planning to drop bombs. One room in the museum is dedicated to the particular fate of the city’s residents whom the Khmer Rouge targeted as intellectuals at odds with its ideal.

On the plane into Phnom Penh I met a Cambodian man, A., who was fifteen when he and his family were forced out of the city. His father, a novelist and the 2nd place winner of a prestigious 1959 writing contest put on by the grandmother of the present king, was executed by the Khmer Rouge. A. does not know where he was killed or where he is buried. Soon after the Vietnamese entered Cambodia, A. escaped to the United States.

Tuol Sleng, otherwise known as S-21, was once a high school. Four months after the Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh, it was converted into the regime’s largest detention center where roughly 20,000 victims were, from 1975-1979, “processed” – that is, unlawfully detained, sadistically tortured, and grotesquely murdered.

The school’s classrooms on the lower level became cells mostly for Khmer Rouge officials who the paranoid regime turned on and accused of spying. In these dimly lit rooms sit single metal bed frames from which dangle rusty iron shackles. On the wall of each of these rooms is a large photograph - taken by the Vietnamese when they found the prison after entering the city - of a bloodied, decaying corpse shackled to the bed. On each bed is the spade used to bludgeon him or her to death, and under the bed are lingering, enormous dark stains.

Somewhere, a toddler screams with laughter and the eerie sound echoes in the corridors.

The classrooms on the second and third floors were subdivided into tiny brick cells. Several of the museum’s other rooms exhibit the mug shots – which the Khmer Rouge took of each prisoner – of the men, women, and children who were held in these numbered cells. Some are hesitantly smiling, some seem to be desperately pleading, and some seem simply bewildered.

Not one of these photographed victims survived. Only seven of the 20,000 detained at S-21 lived, and their photographs are displayed separately.

The most famous of the survivors is a painter, Vann Nath, who was recruited to paint propaganda pictures of Pol Pot. After the regime fell, he began painting what he had seen while a prisoner. His paintings – images of guards ripping out victim’s fingernails, bashing babies against walls and trees, delivering electric shocks to prisoners’ nipples, and lashing shackled men and women - line the museum’s grimy, sparse walls.

In another room are the photographs of the 1,700 personnel and soldiers (“combatants”) who worked at S-21. Most of them are teenagers and they pose for the camera with a flicker of pride in their weak smiles. An exhibit at the museum tries to understand if these boys and girls are as much victims of the Khmer Rouge as are the prisoners they slaughtered.

The equipment that students once used for exercises was converted into a gallows from which prisoners were tortured before being revived again in basins of chemically treated water.

The school courtyard was re-figured into a burial ground. It quickly filled and inmates, after being tortured into giving false confessions, were then taken to the notorious killing fields at Choeung Ek, formerly an orchard. The guide that shows the other Daily intern and me around the museum says her husband was murdered in the killing fields. His throat was slit with barbed wire.

The guide lost her entire family – children, siblings, husband – to the Khmer Rouge. A group of teenaged girls are laughing in a stairwell and the guide speaks to them angrily in Khmer. They slip sheepishly out into the courtyard, which this time of year is strewn with big white flowers that fall from spindly, little trees.

A sign erected in the courtyard lists the “rules” of S-21. #6: “When getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.”

In the afternoon, the other intern and I sit stunned on a bench in Paragon mall watching young couples in skinny jeans walk by hand in hand.