Between 1975 and 1979, an estimated 2 million Cambodians — 20 percent of the country’s population at the time — died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime. Some 17,000 victims were held in the regime’s most notorious prison, a former high school known as Tuol Sleng (“Hill of the Poisonous Trees”) or S-21. Today, the building is called the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Tucked into a busy neighborhood in central Phnom Penh, it’s a carefully preserved nightmare.
Visitors walk through blandly macabre classrooms-turned-torture-chambers, and into tiny brick-and-wood cells where prisoners were held for weeks and months. But their silence is heaviest before the rows and rows of faces — the thousands of black-and-white mugshots taken by the maniacally efficient wardens of Tuol Sleng.
When I visited Tuol Sleng during a reporting trip earlier this year, I took pictures of some of the faces, trying — like everyone around me, I imagine — to see the people within the overwhelming numbers. Later, when I looked at my camera, I saw I’d taken several photos of the same young woman. She was beautiful, with clear eyes, a proud posture and a stylish haircut. But even more striking than her beauty was the way she’d raised one eyebrow in what looked like defiance, and set her mouth in determination instead of fear. She must have known her fate — only seven people are thought to have survived Tuol Sleng — and she’d chosen to meet it with this face.
Who was she? It didn’t take long to find out.
