Today in History - January 10: Twelve survivors out of 20,000 at notorious prison
Drawn into a former high school by an intense stench, Vietnamese photographer Ho Van Tay made a horrendous discovery on January 10, 1979.
The Vietnamese Army had invaded Cambodia (then Kampuchea) weeks earlier, and had entered the capital of Phnom Penh days earlier.
What had been a city of three million only a few years before had been completely emptied of people.
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The classrooms at S-21 had been converted into a series of bricked-up cells. Adobe Stock
The Khmer Rouge regime had forcibly evacuated the entire city in 1975 as part of their extreme communist agenda to turn the country into an agricultural collective.
But one part of the city remained active.
The former Tuol Svay Prey High School had been transformed into a prison and interrogation centre.
When Ho Van Tay arrived at the prison, all that remained were a series of rotting corpses.
He took on the morbid task of documenting the atrocities with his camera.
More than a thousand people at a time would be held at Security Prison 21 or S-21.
There they would be chained to the floor or the wall, forbidden from talking, and fed only the most meagre of rations.
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Photos and detailed documents of prisoners at S-21 were taken by their captors. Supplied
Prisoners who drank water or spoke without permission would be beaten.
Those who broke the rules would be lashed or shocked with electricity.
One of the rules prohibited crying during a lashing or shocking.
The guards, mostly teenagers, were forbidden from conversing with the prisoners.
Under torture, prisoners would write detailed false confessions implicating themselves and others in conspiracies with the CIA, the KGB or Vietnamese authorities.
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An ominous cry for help scrawled on the wall from an English-speaking prisoner. Adobe Stock
They would then be taken to a killing field and killed using a variety of makeshift weapons to save on scarce ammunition.
Of the 20,000 people detained at S-21, just 12 survived.
Among those killed at the centre was just about every foreigner who had been in the country after May 1975.
That included two Australians, Ronald Keith Dean and David Lloyd Scott.
The pair were seized after their boat strayed into Cambodian waters, tortured and murdered.
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Breaking the rules at S-21 would result in severe beatings. Adobe Stock
The chairman of the prison would not face justice until 2012.
Kang Kek lew, a former maths teacher, spent just eight years in prison before he died of natural causes.
An estimated quarter of Cambodia's population is estimated to have been killed in the genocide between 1975 and 1979.
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