Cambodia’s tragic past can be seen less painfully through the perspective of time and its war museum, if not the most cheerful place in the world, can be extremely instructive in terms of coming to grips with what actually happened during those terrible years. The Toul Sleng museum institute was formerly the Pol Pot administrative school before becoming the Khmer Rouge prison. There were lots of people enduring from torturing in this prison. It is said that there were about 14,500 people being tortured and among them were 2,000 children. This museum institute is the combination of four architectural monuments. This is the exhibiting place for tools and stuffs being used to torture and also some relics of the dead. There are some pictures of people before and after enduring from torturing. Some mourning images and some of the not dare-to-see picture are also displayed.
In 7 January 1979, when Vietnam’s liberation army attacked Pol Pot’s prison and Phnom Penh, the guard of this prison killed all the prisoners inside and lived in exile everywhere.
No less instructive is the burial and execution grounds at Choeng Ek where thousands of exhumed skulls are on display.
Tuol Svay Prey High School was originally built as a secondary school in 1960, during the reign of Preah Batnorodom Sihanouk. The Khmer Rouge converted it into a torture and interrogation centre to extract ‘confessions’ of anti-government sentiment. Many victims were women and children incarcerated along with the ‘suspected’ father. Documents recovered indicate that over 17,000 persons had been imprisoned there between1975 and 1978, of whom only seven are known to have survived.
Tuol Sleng was reopened in 1980 as a historical museum memorializing the genocidal crimes of the Khmer Rouge regime. It is open to the public and thousands of Cambodians and foreigners have visited it, bizarrely attracted to the testimony of man’s inhumanity to man.
Source From: http://phnompenhtravel.org