Over a decade ago I visited Tuol Sleng; the secondary school which during the Khmer genocide became S-21; the infamous prison and torture centre of the Khmer Rouge as they forced men and women to provide more and more names to be detained as they slaughtered up to a third of the population in an attempt to reset history to ‘Year Zero’. At the time I was a teacher in China and was enjoying our Lunar New Year holiday backpacking in Cambodia and Vietnam. It was an amazing trip, but it is the afternoon I spent facing the worst of human history which I still remember now.
For a place of such horror Tuol Sleng sits unremarkable, in an average neighbourhood. It sits on the east side of a city block in a neat grid system of streets not far from the Mekong, and the parks and pagodas surrounding the Royal Palace.
What sticks in my memory is the change that happened when I stepped through the gates. The sunny afternoon was a blessed respite from the months of frozen north Chinese winter from which we had just escaped.
It became harsh and oppressive.
The soundtrack of Phnom Penh; the two-stroke engines of tuk-tuks died at the pavement, and a cruel silence pervaded around the site. These memories always come back to me each year as our visit came late in January the same time that Cambodia along with other genocides are commemorated.
I believe that Holocaust Memorial Day is important; a time when we remember the victims and must confront the worst of our human history.
27th January marks the date in 1945 when Auschwitz was liberated, and the full extent and true horrors of the Nazi extermination programme against Jewish, Roma, and Sinti peoples, along with socialists, trade unionists and the LGBT+ communities began to be known.
“Never again” has become the broken promise of the world. The Holocaust Memorial Trust records that since 1945 along with Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur have all experienced genocide with the world watching on.
Unlike many of the Nazi sites where attempts were made to cover up evidence Tuol Sleng remains ‘as it was’; toward the end the Khmer Rouge had turned on themselves, and the Viet forces found the centre following the scent of rotting bodies. The pictures of some of those who were tortured within those walls are displayed on the third floor in old classrooms. They include those identified as KR cadres who fell foul to the horrors they had helped build. Piles of shoes and clothes rotted to rags remain in the stairwells, and chains and bedframes used for interrogation remain.
The oppressive silence which I felt sits in Tuol Sleng as a scar on time. The presence of memorials, students, and tourists doing nothing to break the hold of the interrogators, or the cries of the victims over 40 years later. These scars on humanity in Phnom Penh, Auschwitz, Srebrenica, Al-Fashir, and Kigali keep hearing the cry ‘Never Again’. This year we know the Rohingya remain exiled in Bangladesh, and the Uyghur in concentration camps in Xinjiang. But still… Never Again!