[The following is in regards to the killing fields at Choeung Ek, a famous spot where Cambodians were slaughtered in genocidal numbers by the Khmer Rouge government.]
The truck was large enough to hold sixty people and there was a Land Rover available if more room was needed. The convoy left around six in the evening. The trip to the killing fields at Choeung Ek took about half an hour.
No one kept a list of the children sent to their deaths. The regime liked to recruit the young to do its drudgework, because they were “blank pages”: when they were sacrificed, their “pages” stayed blank.
[…]
Important prisoners – that is, high-raking cadres purged from the regime – also received special treatment. They were executed near S-21 and buried near the intersection of Street 163 and Mao Tse-tung Boulevard, says Duch, short of breath, with his mouth hanging open.
These special prisoners were hit in the back of the head and then had their throats cut, like everyone else. But, unlike everyone else, they were sometimes disemboweled and photographed. This was to reassure the Standing Committee that their former colleagues were dead. The only other victims who were photographed postmortem were those who died in the prison, prematurely, from torture. Prison staff photographed their bodies to prove to the director that the prisoners hadn’t escaped.
Once they arrive at Choeung Ek, the prisoners were led to a wooden shack, one at a time. The generator was turned on so that there was light and, some say, to drown out the sounds. The executioners gathered around pits similar to shell holes, dug into the field around the house. They carried torches and the tools they needed. Him Huy would then go through the list of that night’s victims, checking each name with each prisoner. He had to make sure that he had correctly checked off the names on the list he took back to the prison. An executioner would lead one prisoner at a time from the shack to the execution pit. The executioners would tell the victim that they were taking him or her to another house. The executioners tried to put the victims at ease, to make sure they died in silence.
”We told them to kneel by the pit. We hit them on the back of the neck with an iron bar. We cut their throats. Then we took off their handcuffs and clothes,” says Him Huy.
The men in black killed by night. The executions began around nine p.m. and could last until dawn, depending on the number of people they had to kill. At seven the next morning, Suor Thi had to provide his superiors with the “list of destruction” containing the names and jobs of those who had been executed, as well as the date on which they had been destroyed by the Revolution.
Source:
Cruvellier, T., and Alex Gilly. “Chapter 16.” The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer Rouge Torturer. Ecco, 2014. 115-16. Print.
Further Reading:
The rule of the Khmer Rouge was an especially dark moment in human history, and yet in these times, I doubt many have even heard of it. Yes, the story is out there and not hidden, it's just been swept under the rug, at least in our culture.