I have never seen the sites of the Nazi Holocaust, but S-21, the Khmer Rouge prison and torture centre in Phnom Penh, is one of the most impressive and disturbing memorials to a historical event that I've ever visited. I thought of it again yesterday after the arrest of Nuon Chea, "Brother Number Two" to Pol Pot, and the man held by some historians as most responsible for 200,000 executions carried out by the Khmer Rouge.
As a place of commemoration, it derives its power from its modesty: the banal location in the quiet Tuol Sleng suburb; the shabbiness of the concrete cells and the crudeness of the clumsily forged bars and shackles; and above all, the hundreds of black and white photographs (of 6000 which survive) of the doomed prisoners simply displayed on the walls.
Immediately after my own visit I read Voices from S-1: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison by David Chandler, which is remarkable for combining scholarship with compellingly personal reflection on the broadest significance of the cruelty which was practised there. "As a historian and a student of literature I have tried over the years to control the data I deal with and to comprehend the writings that I read," he records. "When I have immersed myself in the S-21 archive, the terror lurking inside it has pushed me around, blunted my skills, and eroded my self-assurance. The experience at times has been akin to drowning."
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