Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is located in a residential area in the middle of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. This former high school turned torture and execution center is one of the most infamous sites in the country because of the estimated 20,000 people detained in the compound between 1975 and 1979.

Just off Mao Tse Toung Boulevard, in an otherwise normal neighborhood, tourists from all over the world arrive at Tuol Sleng Musuem. Under the Khmer Rouge political movement, Tuol Sleng High School was renamed S-21, a code given to the detainment facilities. Now, a small entrance fee allows visitors to enter the former prison. Camera shutters click at the sign with the translation of the Khmer Rouge regulations. The rules established by the Khmer Rouge leaders, including three uses of the word “thwart,” introduce visitors to the horrible confinement of the Khmer Rouge regime.

On a busy Saturday, hundreds of tourists wonder the long line of rooms in Building A together. In each of the former classrooms, a metal bed frame, bent from the beatings, stood silently in the middle of the room. Hanging above the beds are pictures taken by the Vietnamese liberators of each prisoner beaten and left to die at the end of the regime. Although most of the blood has been washed clean from the floor, anyone who looks upward will notice the ominous red splatters on the ceiling. Building A amounts to room after room of the same solemn bed, the same gruesome pictures and the same empty feeling.

The Khmer Rouge kept meticulous record by documenting and photographing each prisoner before the murder. In Building B, thousands of these photos are showcased. The photos show glassy-eyed women with their hair lopped into blunt bobs, and the hard-faced men staring down certain death. Visitors sense the enormity of the genocide as they pass the haunting faces of people who would soon be killed.

In the other buildings, visitors walk down barbed wire-lined corridors and peer into empty rooms with shackles and numbers on the wall. It's not hard to imagine this place as a mass detention center with rooms full of prisoners. The infamous bloody hand print in one cell is particularly frightening, but in context it seems just another remnant of a torture center.

But it isn't just tourists who visit. Many young Cambodians come to the Museum as to remember the struggles or their parents and grandparents. Almost no one in Cambodia went untouched by the mass murders of the Khmer Rouge regime. The next generation of Cambodians faces an uphill battle to rebuild an infrastructure that was demolished only 30 years ago. The effect of genocide is clear in present-day Cambodia, but the resilient people of Cambodia are ready to overcome the past with a focus on the future.