There's only one thing that kept me alive inside S-21. It wasn't my physical stamina, drained, or my willpower, broken. It wasn't the survival instinct, exhausted. What kept me alive for thirteen months was the KEEP FOR USE sign glued to my cell door.
My life depended on that sign, I wanted to protect it from bad weather and humidity or at least I wanted to be able to watch over it but when the door was closed, the sign remained outside and I couldn't see it.
At night I would fall asleep crouched against the door, with my right ear pressed against the metal to monitor suspicious noises and notice if another prisoner had tried to steal it from me by taking advantage of a distracted guard. Twice I jumped up and started screaming and banging my fists against the door making a hell of a noise. The guards must be appalled at my effrontery. Four of them ran to beat me but I took the blows with a smile because, when they entered, the sign was still in place.
Not only was the theft an anxiety that did not leave me, even the humidity could have been fatal to me, corroding the glue. Every evening, when they took me back to my cell, even at the risk of being hit on the sides, I entered very slowly. I didn't want to have the door slammed behind me because the blast would have weakened the glue.
There were other prisoners with KEEP FOR USE written on the door but they were women that the guards took to have fun, and then left the cell straightening their pants in a hurry and trying not to be discovered by the camp leaders, who didn't look kindly on sexual intercourse: they could have threatened the ideological purity of S-21. However, the cartel of these women lasted a few days, at most three weeks, because the guards got tired of them and new ones always arrived to rape. The guards didn't exactly like women, nor sex, they liked hearing them scream so, when after a few weeks of methodical rapes the victim resigned, they no longer found it funny and took down the sign.
I was arrested in January 1978 in Battambang. I was a farmer in a rice paddy, loyal to the directives of Angkar who wanted an agrarian and self-sufficient Cambodia. News soon circulated that the Khmer Rouges labeled anything approaching intellectual work as a betrayal of the new Cambodia. They included those who wore glasses and long hair in the category of persona non grata and to be re-educated by torture and death.
Before, I painted road signs, nothing ideological, even if my passion was for true painting, in short, artistic painting. But then, just to be safe, I abandoned my brushes and joined a farming community where I ate rice soup by day and prayed to spirits by night. The prayers were ineffective because one day they came for me and took me to S-21. Like virtually all S-21 prisoners, I had no idea what I was accused of and still, nearly thirty years later, I don't.
My two sons, one year old and five years old, were at home with my wife when they came to pick me up at the paddy field and would not let me say hello or warn them before throwing me into a truck. The two children died of hunger before I was released the following year, I never heard from my wife again.
The first month at S-21 they fed me a handful of uncooked rice and five electric shocks a day, without ever asking me anything. I wanted them to tell me what they wanted to know, but every time I opened my mouth to ask, I got a beating in the face. When the third tooth was left on the floor, I followed them with my eyes downcast and with such anxiety that I vomited in my hand so as not to stain the guards who accompanied me and I kept walking towards the room where they laid me on the floor, tied my arms above my head and feet to chains and passed electricity over my body.
One day they picked me up in the morning, handcuffed me and led me arm in arm into a room with other prisoners. We were all identical, all stunted, freshly bruised and pus-draining wounds, with bloody lips and downcast eyes. Before us, a process has begun.
The defendants were a mother and her two teenage children. No one explained what they were accused of and none of us obviously asked for anything. We didn't even know if we had the right to roll our eyes at them. If I could I would have covered my ears because I didn't know if I had the right to listen and I wanted to let him know that the electric shocks had burned my left eardrum.
The mother was tied to a chair and a trickle of blood ran down her right temple. She cried but, all in all, she seemed in good condition, better than mine and the other prisoners around me. She had definitely been recently arrested: her skin was still soft and shiny and she could tell that she belonged to a wealthy class. If I recognized her skin, perhaps that was the charge. The two sons were tied by the hands behind their backs to two metal posts in front of the woman.
The S-21 commander himself, Duch, was directing the process, it must be a big deal. Without preamble, he began waving the gun in front of the two boys.
"Which of the two, which of the two!" she screamed.
The mother didn't answer and continued to cry more and more desperately shaking her head and trying to hide it but her torso was immobilized in the backrest.
"This?" Duch approached one of the two, the younger one, I think, he must have been thirteen at the most. He pushed the muzzle of his gun against his mouth but his refused to open his lips. Then he hit him on the cheek with the butt of the gun. The boy opened his jaw and Duch stuck the barrel down his throat.
"This?" he repeated looking at the woman while the boy seemed to choke. When she pulled it out the boy started coughing.
"This other one?" he went towards his brother, a couple of years older, I think. Instead, he immediately opened his mouth. Duch inserted the gun inside him but then pulled it out almost immediately, probably because if they cooperate it's not fun.
The mother refused to look and cried with her head bowed.
"Okay, let's kill them both" Duch said and the mother reacted by raising her head and trying to throw herself at him but she couldn't reach him.
He pointed the gun at the head of the smaller one, who tried to dodge the trajectory by moving his head but the ropes didn't allow him to go far. Then Duch dropped his shot a little to follow his movements and then shot him in the foot. In sequence he also shot on the foot of the other.
The first bullet that pierced her children's flesh convinced their mother that she could only go home with one of them. She opened her eyes to Duch, still screaming, but with less conviction because she was resigning herself that her desperation about her wasn't going to win anyone's heart in that room.
"This or this?" Duch repeated, waving the pistol in front of the two boys' heads.
The mother gave an imperceptible nod of her head.
"This?" Duch pointed the gun at the eldest's head but kept his gaze on the mother.
The woman didn't answer, she lowered her eyes and continued to cry. Duch looked around.
"That's what he meant, right?" he asked the other soldiers.
Everyone nodded. One of them went to the woman and lifted her head by her hair.
"This?" Duch repeated to the woman that he didn't nod, but he didn't even deny it.
"This!" Duch confirmed in a victorious voice taking a step back and pointing the gun dramatically at the forehead of the older one who was trembling trying to hypnotize the bullet by looking into her eyes. He was foaming at the mouth, biting his lip, I saw the blood run down his chin as Duch smiled before pulling the trigger.
Suddenly Duch moved his arm and shot the other son, the younger one, who collapsed without a moan and without realizing he was dying.
"Free them," Duch said, referring to the mother and son he had sentenced to death, before leaving the room. "Let them go away together, please."
Two guards took them out of the room and the others came and took us back to the cell waving sticks. We, as pheasants, had developed a technique when we were in groups: we all crowded towards the center because we knew that those on the outside would get their knees beaten and then be unable to walk and be killed for insubordination. If we had been smart we would all have gone out to finish it here, since only seven of the 21 prisoners who entered Camp S-XNUMX got out.
The reason for the sign in front of my door is that I am a painter and they knew it of course. Throughout my life, parents and even distant relatives, friends and acquaintances have repeated to me that painting is a useless activity. Growing rice, fixing carburetors, or making knives were decent pursuits for a man who wants to support a family, but I was so enraptured as I entered the pagoda and gazed up at the scenes from the Buddha's life that it was impossible to change my mind. It is grotesque that all the farmers, mechanics and workers who passed through S-21 died and I survived on useless activity.
Someone must have warned someone else, who informed yet another who, in turn, remembered my file and informed those in charge that Pol Pot wanted a series of portraits. The socialist leader of land equality was guilty of vanity. They gave me a black and white photo and told me to reproduce it in portrait.
The first thought that occurred to me was to ask that Pol Pot come there, in front of me, to paint his portrait. And to kill him, I thought. Strange, for me that I'm mild and I'm not quick to think. I asked firmly in my voice. The guard punched me and in an instant catapulted me out of the world where I was a painter and could speak with dignity.
My atelier was one of the teaching rooms of S-21, because before it became a huge tomb, it was a school. Before I was assigned they used it as a torture laboratory, you could still smell the burnt flesh.
They accompanied me through the corridor where all the doors remained open to the interrogation rooms, a gallery of all sorts of atrocities possible. The tormentors kept the door open, perhaps as a central directive that everyone should learn from the techniques of the others, perhaps to boast of their own, perhaps to make the air go round because blood and gangrene stink.
Only my door was closed behind me, not so as not to disturb my inspiration but because one gets bored watching a prisoner paint.
Even with the door closed, I could hear the screams of the tortured, I could hear the noise of the chains as they were dragged into the corridor, as they begged for mercy or, if they were recent prisoners, they asked why they were there. The habit of asking reasons disappeared within a week, then you almost forgot the need to know the reasons for your incarceration. The only thing that mattered was staying alive. Or, conversely, make the pain stop at any cost. I didn't know Kafka at the time but a few years later, after hearing my description, a German journalist gave me a gift The Pprocess, which says that it is enough to beat yourself long enough and hard enough, in deed or word, to convince you that you deserve it.
The first day, without looking up and in the most imploring voice I could produce, I asked that, please, they didn't hit me on the arms and especially on the fingers. I believed that they would have demolished them on the spot. They shrugged and left, closing the door behind them.
I picked up the brush with enormous effort because I was still feeling the beatings from the days before and my fingers were shaking, probably due to the electric shocks.
I began the first portrait of Pol Pot without stopping thinking about how I would like to kill him. This thought didn't help my inspiration, the brushstrokes were tense and I didn't have the delicacy of healthy fingers to balance my mind. I tried to focus on the fact that Comrade Pol Pot was unaware of what was happening here: one day he would come, machine gun in hand, undo all the suffering and free the survivors. But S-21 is a few kilometers outside Phnom Penh, it's impossible to keep it hidden. I continued to paint but in the evening a stylized demon came out and I panicked that someone would see it. Quickly, before they came looking for me to take me back to my cell, I covered it with white tempera to start over the next morning. They had only given me a canvas but a lot of tempera.
It was there that the idea came to me that saved my life.
I have to paint the truth going on here, I told myself, there's no other way not to go crazy. I can't pretend the screams I hear while I'm painting aren't real.
When the guards came to get me they didn't notice that the canvas was blank again but I spent the night in fear that if anyone noticed then they wouldn't give me a chance to continue the work in the new style I had just invented.
On the second morning of "overtime" work, in one of the interrogation rooms across the corridor, a guard held a baby by its feet and smashed it against the wall. A man and a woman, tied to a chair and gagged, watched the scene moaning as if it were being done to them. An older boy was tied to the ground behind the guard and was crying and calling for his mother.
That's the scene I was going to paint on day two, but I had to be the only one to know.
I faced the blank canvas with two pencil sketches, two opposing paintings, whose lines intersected and overlapped. One sketch was the scene of the soldier who, in front of the parents' eyes, slammed the newborn against the wall holding him by the feet, the other Comrade Pol Pot with a paternal and enlightened air.
I knew I couldn't paint one and then the other because it was too risky, because anyone could enter at will, and so I developed a technique whereby, starting from the corners of the canvas, I painted a one-centimetre oblique strip with the scene of infanticide and immediately covered it with a portrait of Pol Pot. So I advanced, hiding the truth under the loving expression of our leader.
Since that day I have painted a portrait a week, eight hours a day, without complaining and without any sticks. After two weeks they increased my food ration to a bowl of rice but this time with a piece of white meat, a privilege.
With this system I sent messages outside, I uncovered the murders, the tortures, the tortures, everything. And to think that I wanted to paint landscapes. Instead I was doing my reporting duty, as diligently as when I was a farmer in the farming community and they caught me and brought me here, I still have no idea why.
I painted the scenes that I happened to glimpse as I crossed the corridor when they took me from my cell to the atelier. I tried to be realistic, there was no need to invent torture or expressions, they were all in front of my eyes at any moment of the day. The only thing I tried to control, but involuntarily, was the faces of the children crossing my paintings. They didn't have to look like my children under any circumstances, I never painted a single child that had anything in common with my children.
Crossing that corridor gave me strength. If they had transferred the brushes to my cell I would have lost all inspiration, instead it was precisely that corridor that gave me a reason to continue, to show the world what was happening here. If the world then decided to see only the reassuring face of Pol Pot without wondering what was underneath, bad karma would fall on it.
I remember one particularly important day because Duch came to the atelier and didn't congratulate me. He didn't even look at me, he just concentrated on yet another Pol Pot painting, right above the picture of the boy he shot in the head in front of his mother.
I lowered my head, but I didn't exist for him anyway. Normally I would have asked if they could provide me with more photographs of Pol Pot but I said nothing and continued to imagine him in different positions. In the end it wasn't difficult, it was enough to embellish it a little, give it a reassuring expression and they were happy.
"Take him away tomorrow," he said, but referring to the painting.
As soon as Duch left I didn't start painting again because I was shaking. The prison commandant doesn't come to see an inmate unless something particularly serious has happened. What could be more serious than discovering scenes of torture under the face of your guide? Instead, he just wanted to check that production was working properly. That evening they also put some herbs to flavor my bowl of rice, I was almost embarrassed. Perhaps Duch had received some compliments and decided to safeguard me. I wanted to warn him not to worry, I didn't lack inspiration.
I remember all the pictures I've painted, even though I've never seen a whole one. One of the ones I was closest to was a portrait of Pol Pot ruling against a background of a community of rice-planting farmers. The real picture, below, told a story that I had reconstructed from details gleaned from the chatter of the guards when they spoke to each other, without malice, because they considered me an animal that did not understand human language. Several times they had mentioned pressing blood supply requests from a Phnom Penh hospital, and one morning we passed a room where a man was strapped to a chair with two needles attached to both arms. The room was adjacent to my atelier and I could hear them talking.
"How much do we get them?" said one of the guards.
“Everything,” another guard replied.
Painting the tortures was the easiest thing because they were so extreme that they painted themselves. The collapsed hope was more difficult, not to represent, but to face. At S-21, people died not only from beatings, exhaustion, dysentery, execution, neglect, disease, but also from suicide. They took you away so much that the prisoners, tied all together to bars, twenty per room, rubbed their wrists against the sharp corners they found to bleed, fall asleep to wake up cradled by the spirits and then return to afflict the executioners with bad karma. Some days I was so desperate that I questioned the very existence of karma, the guards must have accumulated so much bad karma that they couldn't even stand up.
Other prisoners swallowed everything that came to hand, bolts, splinters of wood, tree bark, hoping to kill themselves in some way. But it never worked.
The most difficult painting was that of fear. The guards spent the night telling us to be silent, motionless, hardly breathing, or they would come in and we would have to deal with them. When you fell asleep you were afraid of tossing in your sleep and unleashing their fury and therefore you remained in a lethal half-sleep from which you awoke abruptly, sometimes with a cry, a cry which you then held back and prayed to the spirits who hadn't heard you or could identify its origin and beat the prisoner in the cell next to yours.
This was the theme of another series of paintings: at S-21, solidarity among the desperate was also lost, as is clear from the struggle for water. Rationing the prisoners' water is supreme cowardice in a tropical country where it falls from the sky every day. They gave very little, with a ladle, and when the prisoners fought each other to get to the water, the guards got furious and out of spite they stopped distributing it. They had even managed to turn us against each other in the last days of our lives.
I sent twenty-five messages outside before, one morning, inside the atelier, I found Duch waiting for me. He nodded to the guards accompanying me and they left, leaving the door open.
"Close it!" I scream. From the tone it was clear that they would be slaughtered if they did not obey.
The door closed, I heard the bolt sanding away the rust and I waited with my eyes down to be killed. And I wouldn't even know why I was locked up there.
"Comrade Pol Pot is impressed by your paintings."
I didn't answer, nor did I look up.
«I tried to explain to him that you are a fucking bourgeois and that you deserve to be killed or the hoe but he didn't want to hear any reason. He said that eri a bourgeois, you are now a worker of the revolution.”
I thought that I came from a very poor family and I was a farmer.
“And convinced me.”
Of course she convinced him. The alternative to disagreeing with Pol Pot was joining me here with a handful of uncooked rice a day.
“He wants me to keep painting. Portraits of him."
I stared at his shoes to avoid rolling my eyes.
"So you will continue your work for the revolution."
It didn't go away. He had said what he had to say but I didn't understand why she said it. What was the need to let me know that I was important? I would have worked anyway, they had more persuasive methods than compliments.
«There is something, however, that does not convince me. See that hole over there?”
I made an effort not to look up but I could see him pointing a direction behind me with his text arm.
"See that hole over there?" he repeated in the same tone in which he had ordered the door to be closed.
With a diplomatic job of the eyes I managed to put them at an angle between the floor and the point he was pointing at.
“The guard who's been watching you for the past two weeks says something's off. That you first make streaks of color and then paint our comrade.”
I shivered from a cold that flared up inside me.
“I have no idea what they are. But I don't like them."
In a few seconds I constructed a plausible justification. Those stripes are the basis of the color that brings out the contrast with Pol Pot's face. Incredible, but that's all I could think of.
"I really don't like them."
I didn't speak. I would not have opened my mouth in front of him unless forced with the stick because it was impudent to speak.
“So you have to stop with those lines.”
I closed my eyes.
“There is no reason to have the paintings we have already sent to the party leadership checked.”
That day that news relieved me, only when I was released did I realize that he himself declined further checks because he was afraid of what would happen if they found out that he was being bullied by the prisoners. For this reason the discussion was private, only between me and him. Perhaps the guard who had seen me paint the real picture was already dead.
«You are important for the revolution, continue to support comrade Pol Pot as we all do.» He slammed his fist on the metal twice and the door opened. "Not that important though," he said, turning before walking out.
I remained motionless for many minutes with my eyes down but then I forced myself to grab the brush because I knew that at any moment a guard could be watching me. Duch had worked well: he had instilled in me the idea of total control. I would never attempt anything again because at any moment, whether I was in my closed cell or in the atelier, I self-regulated in fear that someone was spying on me.
I went back to painting, voluntarily slowing down to finish a painting in a week anyway, when three days would have been enough for me. I did three before Duch returned to the atelier, but this time he let himself be announced.
"These are two more photos of Comrade Pol Pot," he said, placing them on a table.
I kept my eyes down and could only see his hands.
"Put it to good use," he said before nodding to the guards who gave way for him in front of the exit.
I suspect there were complaints about the quality of my work because I could no longer paint naturally without the background of truth behind each portrait. They even refilled my bowl of rice and, occasionally, I even got a pho*. Once a week they took me outside and tied me to a post for an hour. Then, without explanation, they took me back to the atelier. Maybe they just wanted me to feel some fresh air because Pol Pot liked my paintings and therefore the quality shouldn't suffer.
From that moment, deprived of the screaming message hidden under the veil of paternalism of our leader, I was afraid of becoming a collaborator of Angkar. It was almost strange that they still kept me in prison, after all I worked for the cause and I did it diligently because now that I was better, that all the wounds in my body had healed and I was less afraid, now I also had more will to live. So I kept my head bowed and serially painted Pol Pot's face for courts, embassies, hospitals, offices. After I left here, I saw my paintings in the background of so many Pol Pot photographs. If he kept them behind his back, he must have loved my style. And I don't mean it as a gratification.
Every day I ask forgiveness from the spirits for those portraits, I ask forgiveness from the dead of that field to calm their anger and drive away the bad karma from me, I know they curse me because I survived.
For six months I swallowed my condition. If outside I painted reassuring portraits, inside I was boiling, but I couldn't find a way to vent the disgust that had taken the place of fear. I had to stay calm as I painted a portrait of a man guilty of making children scream.
Duch also began to visit me regularly. He would sit behind me and he would talk to me about Van Goh and Picasso, he would say I reminded him of their style but I had no idea who he was. I remained silent concentrating on controlling the movements of my hand. Those were the strongest emotions of my entire life, even more than the fear of dying I felt when they took me to S-21. I had to remain impassive hearing Duch's voice behind me and continue to paint relaxed faces: the hair had to be soft, the skin delicate and shiny and the determined and kind gaze of our comrade Pol Pot, a gaze directed upwards, indicating a road fraught with reactionary dangers which would have been overcome by our revolutionary courage.
Duch talked, talked, talked. He gave me advice on how to paint and what to approach Pol Pot, he told me about when he was a child and asked me to draw the fields of his childhood. I never answered, not even once, and Duch never asked me anything or hinted that he would like to know my opinion. Maybe he just wanted to relax a bit and talk to the wall to organize his thoughts.
Then, one day, Duch stopped coming. He disappeared, literally. He no longer came, he no longer passed through the corridors, his voice was not heard threatening anyone. Only his name was passed by word of mouth among the guards, who were also bewildered by his disappearance.
I continued to paint. I had a mission, to stay alive, and I knew how to fulfill it, to celebrate the greatness of our comrade Pol Pot, imagining how I was going to kill him myself.
Duch never showed up again but we prisoners kept him a place in our hearts. It's hard to forget Duch, his voice and his hand on his shoulder while I was painting. I said “we held”: I speak in the plural because I wasn't the only one who left S-21 alive, six other prisoners narrowly escaped death with me. Seven out of fourteen thousand.
The Vietnamese had entered the country and had driven the Khmer Rouges westward where they were preparing the counter-offensive. Their method was to bend the population to make them rebel against the invader. One of the solutions involved undermining the fields to prevent farmers from cultivating them, thus starving everyone. The rage of hunger was supposed to inspire a new revolutionary fervor in the people.
They failed, but it took another twelve years. Twelve years of famine, civil war, disease, the dead walking towards the grave dug in a corner of the jungle.
I went back to Battambang and started painting again. I didn't explain what I'd tried to do at first, I was too ashamed of having survived to make excuses.
Now, free from Duch's gaze, I could finally paint the torture scenes I had seen, freely. Inexplicably, however, they were limp. The eyes of the condemned were empty, the arm holding the whip was soft, there was never enough blood. I didn't get a reason for having lost inspiration, having forgotten what it really meant to feel a prisoner beaten to death with a stick and finished having his throat slit.
The lack of effectiveness in my paintings was a betrayal of the brothers who had died in that school and the spirits plagued my nightmares. I did several ceremonies to drive away bad karma but the solution was closer than I imagined.
It took six months for me to figure out how to get back to painting realistically what I had seen. It was enough to go back to the old style.
I made an attempt to paint the face of a good-natured Pol Pot below a line of blindfolded prisoners, hands behind their backs and ropes around their necks, single file towards a pit that will be their grave. It came perfect to me. There was fear, insecurity, disbelief on their faces. Pol Pot had given me back the gift.
With this new technique I recovered the expressiveness I was looking for and for fifteen years I painted like this, without ever admitting the truth that only painting Pol Pot brought back to me the sensations felt in S-21.
Given the technique I was using now, I certainly couldn't explain what messages I leaked out when I was a prisoner.
In 2001 I was contacted by a French troupe for a documentary. They explained to me that they wanted to reconstruct what happened at S-21, in S-21, and that they had tracked down some of the guards. They wanted me to interview them.
The most insistent question I repeated to the guards was whether they realized the harm they were doing. Whatever answer they gave me wasn't enough, it wasn't enough for me that they justified themselves that they would be killed if they disobeyed, that they had been indoctrinated as children, that they were too young. Nothing was enough for me.
The question I didn't ask him is the one that pressed me the most but I didn't succeed: why was I brought there? No one had ever told me during the torture why I was there, it didn't appear from the documents found by the Vietnamese army in February 1979 and I don't understand where I turned out to be a traitor to their Cambodia.
Going back to that school after twenty years was difficult but not unsustainable. After all, S-21 had always been with me, every day, even in my dreams. Going back was painful but it was worth it to remind everyone that what happened really happened. May no one ever, in fifty years, wake up and say we made it all up.
In 2008, I was contacted by a court claiming to have the backing of the United Nations. I thought they wanted some of my paintings, but they informed me they wanted to try Duch for crimes against humanity in S-21 and there was a shortage of eyewitnesses.
Process Duch? But you can't, he's a demon, was the first thing I thought before accepting.
They expected me to give an accurate description of how S-21 worked, to tell if I had ever been interrogated by Duch himself and if I had ever seen him kill anyone. I'd seen so many die that the two brothers and their mother didn't come to mind, but it was one of the few first-hand stories they knew about. They had found the surviving boy who would tell the story of his brother's murder before the judges and before Duch in the dock. They asked me if I had witnessed the scene. I told them about it and they looked surprised.
On the day of the trial, I saw Duch again after twenty-nine years: a crippled old man panting with fear in a bench and looking down. He didn't even show mercy like that.
In the older man who was there I recognized the boy who had been spared his life and damned his soul that day, the one who was sent home with the mother who had not chosen him. He sat on the witness stand, they introduced him specifying that his mother had died ten years earlier and asked him to tell his story about him.
“My father was beaten when they arrested us. He died in the garden as they took him away. Then they took my mother, my brother and me. They loaded us into two separate trucks, my mother and brother in the first, me in the second. I didn't know what to think, I didn't know what I had done. I didn't know then that they rounded up teachers, like my father. They made me sleep handcuffed to a metal bar and the next morning they dragged me into a room where my brother was tied to a post and my mother to a chair. They also tied me next to my brother and then he came… he» indicated Duch.
"'He' is the defendant?"
"Yes," the man confirmed. “And then some other prisoners started coming in to watch. I don't know why they were gathered around to watch us, I really don't know."
Only I really feel his shame.
The ex-boyfriend had to take a break, took a sip of water and plunged back into memories.
“Duch waved his pistol in front of my brother and me and said that we were children of traitors and therefore we were traitors too. Then he told my mother that a family of traitors doesn't deserve two children, he aimed the gun at my brother's temple and fired. When he was gone, the other guards released my mother and me and let us go."
Duch listened impassively to the story accusing him, but I don't think it was out of coldness. I don't think he remembered the episode.
The prosecutor thanked the man for his testimony and said he wanted to call one of the few survivors of S-21 to add details. The ex-boyfriend raised his head towards the audience, surprised and terrified, and saw me getting up to go towards the witness box. He looked down and I was afraid he wanted to cry.
"Were you present the day Duch killed this man's brother?" began the prosecutor.
"Yes, I was there," I replied.
“Can you tell us how things went? Do you want to correct or add something to your story?”
I didn't even look for the ex-boyfriend with my eyes.
"No, it was all accurate," I said. That was the first time Duch heard my voice.
Duch is still on trial but it doesn't look like he's going to get away with it, which is an understatement when I think he was arrested more than twenty years later. He will probably stay in prison until the end of his life, just as I have my own prison that I took with me when I got out of S-21.
Even now I'm back in my personal prison, watching Duch. In one corner, on the rehearsal table, a blow-up of Duch and Pol Pot stood out together. In the background of the photos, one of my paintings could be recognized, the first one I made, the one with the baby being smashed against the wall.
The author
Giorgio Pirazzini was born in 1977 and studied Communication and Advertising and worked between Italy, Lisbon and London. Since 2007 he has lived happily in Paris. He has published three novels with independent publishing houses in Turin: bad thoughts, At night I pick meat flowers (Las Vegas Editions, 2013 and 2011) e 9 nights in Milan (Mirages Editions, 2011). In 2016, with Baldini and Castoldi, he published Cat therapy.
