S-21 Photographed Its Prisoners. Then Left the Files Behind

S-21 photographed its prisoners and made them write their life stories, so how did the paperwork of a secret prison outlast the flight of the man who ran it? From April 1976, people held at S-21, a Khmer Rouge prison in a former Phnom Penh high school, were photographed on arrival and made to write biographies naming those around them. Interrogators used torture to extract confessions. The museum reports that 4,186 confession files survive, along with 6,578 biographies of victims and perpetrators. On 3 February 2012, the Khmer Rouge tribunal imposed life imprisonment on the prison's chief, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch. In this video: • How did a school built in 1962 become a prison? • Why can no forced confession prove what anyone was made to admit? • Why do the numbers of people held and executed differ depending on who is counting? • How did the records survive when the regime fell in January 1979? • How did the arrival photographs and files become a museum and evidence in Case 001? • Why do many of the faces in the portraits still have no names? This is a story about what a prison's records can show, and what the words forced into them cannot. Subscribe for more histories of the places that held people. #TuolSleng #KhmerRouge #PrisonHistory #TrueCrime #Documentary