Chum Mey and Bou Meng – Survivors of Toul Seng and Polt Pot’s genocide

Man’s inhumanity to man is a depressing theme that, over the centuries, has seemed unwilling to disappear. Most of us thankfully never have to experience first hand a holocaust, witness a genocide or live in a culture of mass murder but that does not mean that we should be oblivious to their lessons nor unwilling to listen to the tales of those that survived – if for no other reason than to give voice to those who perished and whose voices can never speak out again.

I have blogged before about my previous visit to Toul Seng - also known as S-21 – and the nearby Killing fields, when I visited Cambodia a year or so ago. When I returned this time with Karl Grobl, Gavin Gough and members of the Agkor Photo Workshops - we had the extraordinary experience of a personal tour with Chum Mey – 1 of the only 7 people to survive this notorious torture camp, with the 17000 or so less fortunate meeting their grisly death in the nearby killing Fields.

Chum Mey and Bou Meng are 2 of the remaining 3 still alive today, and as Chum Mey led us from room to room, showing how he was shackled, water tortured, beaten or electrocuted, so the horror of Pol Pot’s genocide became more apparent. Bou Meng – a charismatic small man – remained sat behind a small table piled high with his book, happy to share his story and be photographed.

Chum Mey brought the horrors of his capture, detention, torture and survival to life – if that is the appropriate expression to use. Kept alive partly by his ability to repair machines such as typewriters, he told us how he survived two years of torture and fear in a Khmer Rouge death camp, his hopes for his pregnant wife and unborn child.

Close to tears he related how, as the Vietnamese soldiers approached to liberate Phnom Penh, he was marched at gunpoint into the provinces by his fleeing Khmer Rouge jailers. He had a chance encounter with his wife and the young son who was born a few weeks after he was sent to the infamous Tuol Sleng prison in early 1977 but, after two days of traveling together with a group of other prisoners, the guards ordered them to walk into a rice field before suddenly opening fire with their AK-47 assault rifles.

With tears rolling down his cheeks, he related how they shot his wife in front of him. “She turned to me and yelled, ‘Please run, they are killing me now’. I heard my son crying and then they fired again, killing him. When I sleep, I still see their faces, and every day I still think of them”

His life now is focused on two things: being a witness and appellant at the International Tribunal where the 4 remaining Pol Pot regime leaders are on trial or subject to appeal and secondly escorting visitors around his former jail.

For many of us it was difficult to understand why, with the memories still clearly raw after 35 years, he chooses to spend his life this way. But with the calm authority of a survivor now at peace with his life, he and Bou Meng are adamant that the younger generation must know the full story, that they must learn the value of humanity and understand the lessons that history can teach us.

Both Chum Mey and Bou Meng accorded me the great honor of sitting down with me and letting me record their stories for posterity. With nearly 2 hours of audio – all through a translator and with the daily noise of Phnom Penh in the background, the audio is of mixed quality – i listened to their haunting tales.

But theirs is a story that must not be forgotten. I feel – having been so touched by their humility, their objectivity and their kindness – that I must find a small way of bringing some of this story to a wider audience.

So working with Karl Grobl, we will try and combine some of the images we both shot that day, some of the audio we recorded into a short Soundslides presentation that I hope to post in the next week or so. Of course a 2 min multimedia presentation cannot really do justice to their story. But I hope it might encourage some of you to read about them, to visit Cambodia and to understand a little bit more of the extraordinary men who are the remaining survivors of Toul Seng – or S-21 – prison camp, and the genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot and his regime.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 22nd, 2011 at 10:49 am. It is filed under Humanitarian, Travel, Workshops and tagged with Angkor Photo Workshops, Bou Meng, Chum Mey, Genocide, Karl Grobl, Phnom Penh!, Pol Pot. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.