If you travel to Cambodia, don’t ignore the popular tourist destination Tuol Sleng Museum in the center of Phnom Penh. When stepping on, you sure feel creepy before the scene of brutal tortures that were recorded in the period of Khmer Rouge. The capital Phnom Penh is always sultry, now stuffier when you enter Tuol Sleng Museum – a place to keep evidence of the genocide.
Prior to 1975, Toul Sleng was a high school. When Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge took the power in 1976, they turned this place into a prison and place of interrogations. According to the documents found, it was designed specifically to work for interrogate and kill the “betrayals”.
Toul Sleng “Hell” has 4 main parts used as a place to administer, detain, interrogate and torture.
During 4 years (from 1975 to 1979), about 20,000 people were detained here (not include the number of killed children). There were many foreign victims as Vietnamese, Laotian, Thai, Indian, American, Canadian, Australian, but mostly Cambodians. They came from all sectors in the society: farmers, workers, engineers, mechanics, teachers, professors, students, and even ministers…
After the dark period, the government has turned the place into a museum containing evidence of crimes of Khmer Rouge for to visit, explore and learn about the history.
Step through the chilly gate, 14 tombs without headstones barricading the entrance. These were the 14 last victims of the prison.
Inside, it is exactly a hell on the earth. The horrifying images of people, brutal torture instruments, the bloodstains on the floor, and blackened walls over time…all of them make visitor feel frightened.
Those who were sent here suffered the painful death. No matter anyone, men, women, adults or children were tortured to die. All of the types of torture were extremely brutal: drawing nails, carving breasts and dropping centipedes for biting, flushing acid into the face … They even “resolved” children for short by hit the kids into the trees around the prison. The vestiges have now still remained.
Also, there is a room containing hundreds of stacked skulls, most of them have still existed the marks of severe tortures like spiking into the head, hammering on the head…
This place currently still stores the artifacts, photographs, and materials… for tourists to visit and learn about the crimes of Khmer Rouge. It is one of the attractions that many foreign tourists want to visit most in Cambodia. However, they are still fearful and don’t dare to see because the artifacts here make them shudder.
If you have an opportunity to travel Cambodia, do not miss to visit this museum.
