[The following is an account from Norng Champhal of his time at the detention center S-21 during the height of the Khmer Rouge atrocities in the late 1970s. He was 9 years old at the time.]
In a few short months, little Champhal had already had enough time to learn to use the term “Polpotists.” In his testimony at the time, he described in extraordinary detail what he saw and experienced at S-21:
Each time Polpotists got angry, they beat us mercilessly. They hit us on the head. They kicked us in the back when we did not go quickly. Once, after we heard gunshots, my brother and I hid behind a heap of clothes taken from the prisoners. At that moment, I saw they were killing a boy a little older than me. He was bashed against a tree beside the kitchen. I did not know where they threw the body of the boy. […]
While I was in the prison, I saw the most atrocious tortures by the Polpotists against prisoners. The women prisoners were plunged into water tanks. Some days before their departure, they showed me a photo of my disemboweled mother. […]
Once, after lunch, I saw five Polpotists taking a prisoner wearing white knee-breeches and a blue shirt to the gallows. After knotting [the rope around] his neck, they pulled up the other end of the rope in a way that the poor prisoner rose in the air. Then they loosened the rope and let the prisoner fall down from a high gallows. The victim suffered this sort of torture for the second time, before his body was dragged to a cell beside the electroshock room. After some time, they brought out another prisoner, who had on only knee-breeches. They killed him in the same manner. After his death, I saw his tongue [fall] out of his mouth. And then they led the third, who went slowly, because his hands were busy holding up his unbraced knee-breeches. They beat and kicked him in the back to make him go quickly. He was then hung up in the air. As his knee-breeches slipped down to his feet, the Polpotists burst into gleeful laughter.
Source:
Cruvellier, T., and Alex Gilly. “Chapter 12.” The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer Rouge Torturer. Ecco, 2014. 88. Print.
Original Source Listed:
“Testimony of Surviving Prisoners, Investigation Report, People’s Revolutionary Tribunal Held in Phnom Penh of the Trial of the Genocide Crime of the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary Clique,” documents collected by “a group of Cambodian jurists” (August 1979), pp. 134-35.
Further Reading:
សារមន្ទីរឧក្រិដ្ឋកម្មប្រល័យពូជសាសន៍ទួលស្លែង (Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum) / Security Prison 21 (S-21)
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