TO BE SURROUNDED by thousands of eyes in an empty room is a profoundly disturbing experience, particularly when you know that all of those staring back at you are dead and may have died in great pain in that very room. It’s even more disconcerting when you know that when they look back at you they continue to see their tormentors standing where you now stand. In Cambodia, people say that those who died violently and with their eyes open cannot find peace and are condemned to wander the world of the living for eternity.
Upstairs in the archives there were more pictures, stuffed in a desk. I found one, a head-and-shoulders portrait of a prisoner. To the right of the picture, a man can be partially seen. He was almost certainly a guard, possibly the chief interrogator, Comrade Chan. He is rearranging his krama around his neck as he stands on the step of a doorway. His black uniform has merged with the shadows. There is no face. It is lost between frames.
I wanted to shift the frame a little, to move the camera still further to see who he was talking to, what they looked like and what they were doing. I imagined them in a group, standing around the photographer as they waited for him to take the picture, talking among themselves. I wondered if they could hear screams reverberating around them.
In 2001, I tried to locate the Khmer Rouge photographer who had taken these pictures. Nhem Ein had stayed with the Khmer Rouge almost until the end of the war and I had been warned about him. A Khmer friend told me, ‘Old Khmer Rouge cannot turn back–they cannot change.’ The same friend also said that I would have to pay for the photographer’s time, otherwise he wouldn’t talk. ‘He’s very welcoming but when the interview is over he changes. He wants money–he’s very greedy.’
The Khmer Rouge had made Nhem Ein a photographer and, albeit for very different reasons, his portraits of the condemned had made me one too. But unlike other photographers who had influenced me, there was no artistry in his work. It was functional, an extension of the torture, nothing more.
When I first came across the photographs of the prisoners in the National Geographic, I was shocked. They were simultaneously compelling and horrifying. As images of faces they seemed so passive and yet there was a violence present, an expectation as well as an accusation. What impressed me most, however, was that they were proof of mass murder collected by the perpetrators.
By the early 1990s, Nhem Ein’s negatives at the museum were in danger of being completely destroyed by neglect. The staff in the museum lacked the necessary storage conditions to preserve the archive and mildew, dust and white ants were beginning to take their toll. In 1993, two American photographers, Douglas Niven and Christopher Riley, realising the documentary importance of the images, began to clean, catalogue and print all the existing negatives. It took them three years.
Niven was the first to discover who Nhem Ein really was. He came across an article in a Khmer newspaper about a defector from the Khmer Rouge headquarters of Anlong Veng who had claimed that Pol Pot was alive and well. The Khmer Rouge had begun to implode and government forces were converging on their jungle base. The defector said that he had been with the Khmer Rouge since 1970 and had trained as a photographer in China. Niven had always suspected the Tuol Sleng photographer had foreign training. ‘We’d even thought that a Chinese adviser had helped them get started, as the work they did there was technically very good–good exposures, good processing,’ he said. Even fifteen years later, when Niven began printing them, ‘the negatives were in remarkable shape.’
Within days Niven had tracked Nhem Ein down. Ein had kept the mug shot he had taken of himself at Tuol Sleng to show to Khmer Rouge as a form of identification and to ensure safe passage through the front lines. Several years later Ein had showed me the same photograph, which he kept laminated in his wallet.
Nhem Ein, was now living in the former Khmer Rouge enclave of Anlong Veng, due north of Siem Reap. He was involved in politics and represented the Royalist Party in the area. I eventually found him visiting Siem Reap on some political business. As my friend had predicted, Nhem Ein asked me for $300 for an hour of his time. Ein’s pictures from Tuol Sleng had been reproduced in a book in the United States, and published in the New York Times, the Telegraph Magazine and countless photography magazines. They had been exhibited in more than fifteen galleries worldwide. He knew what he was worth. I managed to bargain him down to $50.
Nhem Ein’s grin sparkled gold as he grabbed my hand and began speaking in fluent Thai. He was dark, stocky and short and had the burly look of a foreman on a construction site. When the smile faded, it was replaced by a severe look that contrasted with his comically squeaky voice. Later, when I photographed him, he looked intensely into the lens. Only then could I imagine him in his black Khmer Rouge uniform and Mao cap.
Nhem Ein had spent most of his life with the Khmer Rouge. He had been recruited at the age of ten before being thrust into a war which had brutalised him and moulded him into the new kind of Khmer the regime was trying to create. He was a true child of the revolution and it was in that world that he remained. To talk with Ein was to enter the realm of S-21.
Nhem Ein had been a model Khmer Rouge. He was from pure peasant stock, young, ambitious and eager to seek approval from his superiors. ‘Those chosen to work in the Santebal were all good people,’ he said. ‘We were like monks in the pagoda. There was no drinking, no prostitution, no gambling, no corruption, no stealing.’ As a boy, Ein’s father had cautioned him before he left home, ‘The rice won’t bear grain when it stands tall, but it will if it bows.’ Nhem Ein took his father’s advice to heart and became an adept survivor.
When Nhem Ein likened S-21’s staff to Buddhist monks, he was closer to the Khmer Rouge’s origins than he perhaps understood. As young boys, many cadres were taught at pagoda schools. Like the leaders of the Khmer Rouge, Buddha created the monkhood, or Sangha, who took vows of celibacy, poverty, and moral restraint with a conformity of purpose. By following Buddha’s teachings everyone could attain enlightenment. People under Khmer Rouge rule were to lead simple rural lives based on equality, selfsacrifice and a moral regimen of monk-like strictness. Everything was done for the masses and the nation. Individual thought was prohibited. Even the Khmer Rouge practice of killing entire families thought to be tainted by decadent city living–the new people–was considered as an act of purification, not dissimilar to Buddhist rites. ‘Burn the old grass,’ ran the Khmer Rouge adage, ‘to let the new grow through.’ When they took power, they emptied the temples and monasteries, and disrobed the monks and forced them to work in the fields. Or they simply killed them: for the Khmer Rouge, monks were ‘parasites’ who fed off the blood of the people. Pagodas and schools were turned into pigsties, warehouses and torture chambers. When I asked a Cambodian friend why, he replied, ‘Because you can’t hear the screams.’ Pagodas were often the only village buildings made of brick and mortar.
Much of what the Khmer Rouge understood was based on what they saw around them and their thinking was shaped by the past. Despite their claims to a classless society, they didn’t provide people with an alternative to the old system; they simply destroyed it and replaced it with a replica of the same power structures that had existed before. Their claims that the revolution had no precedent, that what they were embarking upon had never been done before in history, were patently untrue.
‘The survival and death of the country and nation depended on Tuol Sleng prison,’ said Nhem Ein with an air of self-importance. ‘If there was no Tuol Sleng, the country and nation would be ruined, because this place was the centre for security. It was the special agency of the country.’ I asked him what he meant. ‘You are either alive and your heart is beating or you are dead,’ he said impatiently. ‘Tuol Sleng was the heart of the movement, the heart of the country. If security was not established the situation would become chaotic and the nation would be in trouble,’ he said, as though reciting something that had been drummed into him without him understanding what it meant. He sat back looking directly at me, awaiting my reaction. ‘It’s the only way I know how to explain it. It was the centre, the most important prison.’
After the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975, Nhem Ein worked as a messenger delivering communications, by bicycle, between Monivong hospital in the city centre and Ta Khmao prison on the outskirts. It was a trusted job that earned him respect among the cadre. It was at Monivong hospital that he first met Duch. ‘My impression of him was that he looked like a humble person, a reasonable person, but I knew that he was a right-hand man of Pol Pot,’ he said. The first meeting was brief, and shortly afterwards Ein was called by the Organisation to go to China. He was sent to Shanghai, along with several hundred Khmer Rouge, where he was trained in photography, printing, film-making, film projection and map-making. It wasn’t until he returned to the capital to work at Tuol Sleng that he realised how terrifying his new boss could be. Nhem Ein said that Duch was hot-tempered and irrational, particularly with his staff. ‘He became angry without thinking and ignored their reasons,’ he said. ‘He gave execution orders without hesitation.’ They lived in constant fear, ruled by the whims of an arbitrary boss. As Ein had said, ‘He could accuse me of being an enemy too. And I wasn’t even a prisoner.’
Nhem Ein’s darkroom and studio were located next to Duch’s home, a few minutes’ walk from the prison gates. Here he and his assistants worked, sometimes around the clock, producing photographs that were stapled to the confessions and then sent to the Higher Organisation. In the deserted capital, looting for the party was sanctioned. ‘We used to get all the chemicals and paper and film from the shops,’ he grinned.
Ein learned quickly and became skilled at winning allies among the higher-ranking cadres. It was the way to ensure protection. As well as his work at the prison, he was sometimes ordered to photograph the few foreign visitors to Cambodia, such as Chinese delegations, as well as party meetings and rural construction sites.
‘The workers were all equal, like the surface of a board. There was nobody who bowed and saluted you,’ said Ein. Even so, Ein became something of a favourite with Duch, who was no doubt impressed by his impeccable revolutionary credentials. ‘I was the son of a poor farmer and I’d lived with the Khmer Rouge since 1970. That’s why the cadre liked me.’ Duch gave Ein a nickname: A Khmao or ‘blackie’, a reference to his dark peasant’s skin. He also called him A Kleum or ‘the essence’, which also meant, short but very talented. ‘He was proud of me,’ said Ein. ‘And I was also proud of myself.’
As a result Ein was given more freedom than other staff. Unlike others, he could walk around the prison at will and could venture out into the streets of the city.
Nhem Ein both venerated and feared Duch and still refers to him as Ta or ‘uncle’. Ein was one of the few who saw him outside the prison, where Duch was relaxed and easygoing. ‘But in work he was a perfectionist. Everything had to be perfect,’ he said. ‘He had many sorts of characters, which varied in different situations. He was a wonderful person. He could be anybody. He could play the role of a giant, a cruel man, a gentle man, a sad man or a miserable man.’ He was also an accomplished speaker. During the many seminars and meetings, if Duch saw his staff’s concentration wane, he would liven up the talks with jokes and often had them in fits of laughter.
I wondered what the prisoners would have thought, silently listening as the sound of hilarity filtered up to the rooms where they lay waiting.
I looked at the photograph of Duch that I carried around with me. He looked confident and self-possessed at the podium. I later came across another photograph from the archives. In it, S-21 staff and their families were having a meal. The table had been set up in the courtyard of a large villa at night. At the other end is another photographer, one of Ein’s assistants, looking through his viewfinder. In between the two photographers, to the side, is a grinning Duch walking confidently behind those seated. At the other end of the table several cadres have their heads turned towards the gate and the darkness beyond. Perhaps another truck had arrived or was departing with its cargo of prisoners.
‘He was a clean leader who wasn’t corrupt or partisan,’ said Ein. The fact that Duch rarely ate separately from his staff impressed him. ‘He had good discipline and good morals and didn’t betray the masses. He rarely ate at home, because it was an equal society where there were no rich and no poor people. Nor were there people who had more delicious food to eat. If we were to eat spicy, sour soup, everybody would eat the same spicy, sour soup regardless of how high your rank was.’
Ein explained that Duch liked to set an example to his staff and often referred to his Ho Chi Minh sandals in his speeches or when he wished to make a point. They were the standard footwear of the Khmer Rouge, made of recycled rubber from car tyres, and he had kept them since he joined the revolutionary forces in 1970. They signified how important it was for the revolution to remain true to its idealism and never to forget the origins of the struggle. The last time Ein saw Duch, in the forest in 1979, he was still wearing them.
That Duch had tortured prisoners was certain, but I wondered to what extent he had the power to operate on his own initiative?
‘He did nothing without orders,’ said Nhem Ein confidently.
Did he ever see Duch beat prisoners? I asked. ‘I didn’t see him beat the prisoners. No,’ he said shaking his head vigorously. I pressed him further still. He became sullen. He resented being contradicted and became evasive, giving monotone one-line answers. ‘I just focused on my work as a photographer,’ he said, ‘he must have beaten people, because he was the chief of the prison.’
I told him that I wanted to know what he saw. I began to think that he had been with the Khmer Rouge for so long that he found it difficult to navigate questions directed at what he thought and what he knew. Before it had been dangerous to confide in others. He had known how to avoid trouble and told those in authority what they had wanted to hear and did exactly as he was ordered. As a result, he was thrown off balance when the questions were aimed at him. He expected to be listened to, not challenged and his answers were often contradictory. Even five years after he left the Khmer Rouge he was still guarded about saying too much. He attempted to lead the conversation elsewhere and talked in vague generalisations–unless really pressed. Then he became angry.
‘I didn’t see everything!’ he snapped. ‘There were tens of thousands of prisoners. My duty was as a photographer, I had to take photographs!’
In all the time he worked he didn’t see Duch interrogate anyone?
‘Only once.’
Nhem Ein abruptly changed the subject and began to tell me of the cameras he had used. He made no attempt to hide his boredom. Later, when I showed him photographs I had found of prisoners who had had their throats cut, asking if he had taken them, he gave a large yawn and replied that he hadn’t. He picked up one of my cameras and looked through my portrait lens at me. Unnerved, I tried to continue. He interrupted me and asked how much the camera cost and if I would get him one.
‘He beat Sri once,’ he said, almost as an afterthought. Sri ran the cookhouse. He had been accused of attempting to poison the staff of the prison. He had found a bottle of what he thought was fish sauce in a house and put some in a large pot of soup. When he found it to be inedible he disposed of the soup in a desperate bid to conceal his mistake but the smell of chemicals betrayed him. It was on the plates when the meal was served. Then there was no soup to eat with the rice, which confirmed his guilt. Sri must have known he wasn’t going to get away with it. It was just a matter of time. And sure enough, later that night, the guards came for him.
Sri had been in the interrogation room for an hour before Nhem Ein was sent for. Duch was already there with two other interrogators when he arrived. ‘Who told you to do this?’ screamed Duch, pointing at Sri’s face. ‘You wanted to kill all the prison guards to get rid of them!’
He paced around the room with a large rattan stick.
Duch then lunged at Sri and beat him with all his might. He was wild with rage. ‘He shouted out loud like a giant in a play,’ recalled Ein.
‘You did this to kill me!’ Duch yelled. Sri pleaded that it had been an accident. The beatings continued. Later he confessed to being a CIA agent and that he had worked under orders to poison the staff. ‘There was no doubt that everyone would have been killed if he had put the poison in the soup,’ said Ein. Whether the cook had deliberately done it or not wasn’t the point; to destroy food at this time was an act of treason.
When Ein took his photo, Sri had a vacant look in his eyes. ‘His body was severely broken,’ said Ein. ‘He already looked like a corpse.’ Ten other members of the kitchen staff were also implicated and interrogated. Among them were two of Nhem Ein’s relatives, Chorn and Srun. They were young men who had grown up with Ein, in the same village. Ein remembered Srun as an honest and gentle person. After he took their photographs, they were taken away. ‘They said they didn’t know anything when they were asked. When the interrogators whipped them harder they too confessed that they were CIA agents.’
I asked him how he felt when he looked at his own relatives through his viewfinder. He thought carefully for a moment. ‘I felt sad, scared and confused,’ he said. ‘I would have died too if I had shown any reaction.’
After Sri and the others had been dealt with, Nhem Ein saw Duch at the canteen. He sat as usual at the table reserved for him with his messenger, Comrade Hor, and the chief interrogator, Comrade Chan. He looked normal, said Ein–as though nothing had happened.
All orders came from the Higher Organisation, explained Nhem Ein. ‘Duch only dared to execute prisoners on such orders. But he could make his own decisions about the workers at the prison. He would punish anybody who made mistakes, because during that time the chief of a team of three men had the power to kill his own subordinates.’ But, Ein added, he had never seen Duch kill anyone personally.
In the paranoid world of S-21, not even Nhem Ein was immune from the suspicions of his workmates. ‘I once got into trouble when I printed a photograph of Pol Pot because it had a black mark on it.’ Somebody told Duch, who openly criticised him in a meeting in front of the others. Duch began by congratulating Ein for having done good work in the past. Then he expressed his disappointment in Ein and began to criticise him for becoming complacent and negligent in his duties. Eventually he accused him of being an enemy of the Organisation. ‘I was very scared,’ said Ein. ‘It was a life-and-death situation for me.’
He was then taken away, not to a cell, but to raise livestock for the prison kitchen, outside the city. Meanwhile, Comrade Duch made his own enquiries about Ein. He found out the film was faulty. ‘Then, they decided that I was a good person again,’ said Ein. Workers at Tuol Sleng were often killed for far lesser crimes.
Nhem Ein didn’t just photograph prisoners and foreign delegations. ‘Sometimes Duch told me to take photographs of his wife and daughter at their home.’ Duch’s first child, Ky Siew Kim, was born in 1977. Before long it had turned into a weekly ritual. Ein photographed her in her cot and taking her first steps with her father. ‘He would hold her and kiss her and although he was strict he was very good with her.’ Duch was a different person at home and posed with his daughter as any proud father might. This wasn’t part of Ein’s job, but Duch was not to be refused. ‘When I took the pictures I was very scared,’ he said. Duch framed some, others he put in albums. None of them have survived.
Everyone collects photographs. They are a universal currency of common experience: pictures of babies, school photographs, formal portraits, photographs of weddings and holiday pictures. They define who we are, characterise us and the way we wish to remember and be remembered.
Nowhere is the loss of Cambodia’s population under the Khmer Rouge more heavily impressed on the outsider than on the walls of Tuol Sleng. Ein’s pictures have become iconic representations of the Cambodian holocaust. The photographic evidence is, on first viewing, a simple and straightforward documentation of mass murder by the killers. There are the mothers with their babies, the young girl with terror in her eyes, the old woman who appears resigned to her fate. But on closer scrutiny, the photographs are the very antithesis of the cut-and-dried confessions, full of ambivalent narratives and subtexts. They depict a world of doubt, of pain and suffering that the words do not.
Death is central to these images and yet, for the most part they depict people who are alive, frozen in time by the fall of the shutter. Their deaths have already taken place, but the people in the pictures continue to live. Looking at Chan Kim Srun and her baby, it is easy to believe she is imploring you to help. It is the illusion of intimacy that is so troubling.
The feeling of helplessness when confronted with the photographs is almost suffocating. We want to do something, they demand action and yet we know that there is nothing that we can do. They continue to repel, engage, shock, outrage and, worst of all, exclude. The photographs of the dead, like the ones I looked at with Prak Kahn, are grisly, but the dead bear little resemblance to real people. It is the faces of new arrivals that stop us in our tracks. The sheer volume almost dulls the senses. And we stand there helpless in front of these mute faces.
Upstairs in the museum, I found wallets among a pile of discarded Khmer Rouge Mao caps and clothing. In another drawer in the archive I came across several sepia photographs of Khmer Rouge that looked like pictures of comrades and wives, keepsakes with bevelled edges possibly from the wallets. No-one knows who the youthful soldiers are. They are most likely some of the Khmer Rouge from the Eastern Zone, hundreds of whom were purged at Tuol Sleng.
When Ein’s pictures were exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York accompanied by a book, I began to wonder whether their meaning had been completely lost, whether what had happened under the Khmer Rouge had been fully understood.
Many of the images from Tuol Sleng were taken in isolation, with a white backdrop, without a context, as though in a void between life and death. More than twenty years after the horror this allowed people to view Ein’s pictures simply as portraiture. Viewed in this way the photographs make subjects real to us but at the same time deplete any sense of urgency. In a gallery, they become studies in photography’s aesthetic possibilities first, and evidence of mass murder second.
The more explicit images were not among those exhibited in New York such as the photograph of a man whose head had exploded from the impact of a shovel, his blood splattered across the tiled floor. Or a series of pictures of a dying man who tries desperately to escape from the camera, sliding through a pool of his own blood.
The book of mug shots was a sumptuous volume of more than seventy photographs. It was called The Killing Fields, borrowing its title from the film, even though all the pictures had been taken in S-21. There were no captions and the two essays at the back were added, it seemed, almost as an afterthought. To view them in this way one feels almost predatory. They looked more like anthropological studies. The victims are presented as the Khmer Rouge saw them: without a name, without family, without an identity or country. By the time Niven and Riley were shown the design it was too late to make any changes. But this didn’t dampen publisher Jack Woody’s excitement when he first saw the pictures. ‘I thought they were the most amazing photographs I’d seen in years,’ he said. ‘The emotional rapport the viewer has with subjects I hadn’t experienced in a long time. I thought to myself, “That’s as good as photography gets.”‘
At the show at MOMA, the photographer was credited as ‘unknown’, further adding to the mystique surrounding the Khmer Rouge, even though Niven had met Nhem Ein several months before.
It seems disingenuous to me to display these photographs without making clear why it is considered important to show them. There is a danger of it becoming a selfdefeating exercise in highbrow voyeurism. One of the reasons there are so few photographs in this book is because of my increasing frustration with photography’s limitations. The display of the images becomes a passive act of remembrance, rather than a call for justice. As one visitor wrote in a visitors’ book, ‘I don’t believe MoMA had the intention to completely objectify these terrible images, but this mute and “neutral” exhibition does that in the coldest possible way . . . As a child of Holocaust survivors, I feel that this kind of behaviour is at best indicative of a smugness and an intellectual laziness–AT WORST IT IS INHUMANE.’
Showing the images in this way can also encourage us to forget what governments do in our name. There was a direct relationship between the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the US government. Many people in the pictures had been accused of being CIA. Kissinger and Nixon had secretly bombed the country and had sent troops to invade it. The UN had supported the Khmer Rouge for years and some of those responsible had lived as diplomats in New York. These images are all too easily transported into icons of universal, or ‘third world’ suffering, disassociated from their political, historical and social context.
For the majority who lived through the Khmer Rouge, this is a story without a conclusion. Cambodians still go to the museum in Phnom Penh today to look through the pictures and try to find out what happened to lost relatives. On occasion, they find them; the shock of recognition is an end to hope. I wondered what those who had lost loved ones would feel about images of their husbands, wives or children being viewed by strangers in art galleries on another continent. Would Holocaust survivors allow pictures of Nazi terror to be presented in the same way?
Photographs are a material trace of a past, like a fingerprint or the smear of a hand on a wall. (Some of the negatives from the prison had fingerprints on them.) The pictures from Tuol Sleng are the last traces of people who have otherwise vanished. There are few memorials and their bones remain unidentified. The negative lies at the very heart of eyewitness photography. With the advent of digital photographs the production of negatives is no longer a part of this process. Negatives don’t just furnish evidence–they are evidence.
I asked Nhem Ein how he wanted people to react when confronted with his photographs in New York.
‘Firstly,’ he said, ‘they should thank me. Some people sold these images and some made news out of them to make money. For me, when they see that the pictures are nice and clear, they’d admire the photographer’s skill.’ As he talked he became more animated, his mood changed. ‘None have any technical errors. Secondly, they would feel pity and compassion towards the prisoners.’ He thought for a moment and then corrected himself. ‘Firstly, that they feel pity for the prisoners in the pictures, who are all dead; secondly, they’d say the photographer could take very nice shots.’
I wondered whether Ein’s comments were really so different from the photographers of today. There is a need amongst many photojournalists (myself included) to justify what we do. Many imply that they give more than they take and often elevate photography to realms of a higher calling among the ranks of great literature, opera and fine art. Critics drape photographs of starvation in grandiloquent and generalised language and comparisons are made to the works of Goya or to Picasso’s Guernica. The writer Eduardo Galeano referred to the dying in Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of famine as ‘a potent magic, a luminous mystery that redeems the human adventure in the world’. The suffering these kinds of pictures often describe is robbed of its impact. As magazines and newspapers become more politically safe and lifestyle-orientated, some of the most important work is often only ever seen in galleries, exposed only to a cultural elite. There they hang cleansed by the antiseptic of the art world.
Such arguments did not concern Nhem Ein. His task was straightforward. Taking photographs was the perfect accompaniment to the bureaucracy, part of a ritual of picture taking in officialdom. The world of S-21 demanded it. As long as the image appeared clearly on the negative, that was all that mattered.
‘Once the prisoners were put in front of the camera lens, nobody ever tried to struggle,’ he said. He believed that all the people taken to the prison were guilty. ‘Communism,’ he said, switching back to his robotic rationale, ‘was to abolish the capitalists, the students and the intellectuals. I thought that it was important for society. But some people were good people.’
What about the children? I asked.
‘No,’ he said quickly, ‘for me, I didn’t think they were guilty. They were arrested because Duch considered them part of an enemy network that had to be killed. When I saw them though my camera lens, in my heart, I also felt pity, sympathy for them. You’d admit that you were guilty if you were beaten and in pain. They would implicate one after another just like that. These people had not done anything wrong. It’s no different from Sri, the cook. He was the only person who was guilty. But he implicated everyone when he was arrested. He implicated the men from my home district. They were just children of poor farmers, but he said they were CIA agents.’
There was nothing he could do, he said. ‘A person’s hair belongs to their head. Nobody could interfere in the other person’s work. You were a medic; you only minded your work. If your work was interrogation, you only minded your interrogation work. In my heart, I felt that it was very unjust. I was like a boy in the pagoda and compassionate towards the victims. I always thought of the old people. I used to put some sugar in a bag of photographs and secretly gave a bottle of sugar to each of the old people. We drank sugar with water to regain our energy.’ If this was true, it was a courageous and even reckless thing to do.
Ein had given up photography some time ago and was now hoping to be appointed governor in the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng. He had left a wife and six children and married another woman. He must have known that he would be called as a witness to any trial and that his photographs would be primary evidence. The thought didn’t seem to bother him.
When I gave him the $50, a sheepish grin appeared on his face and he asked for more. I told him that it was all that I had. He pressed me. I gave him an extra five dollars.