The Master of Confessions Read Online Free PDF Page A

They were no longer worthy of the Glorious Revolution, and their clothes would be redistributed. This also prevented them from hanging themselves with the clothing.
    Once the detainees had been identified, registered, photographed, and relieved of their revolutionary attire, Suor Thi handed them over to a guard, who took them to their cells. Sometimes he went to the cells himself to check prisoners off his list. But when he did, he says, he paid little attention to the conditions in which the men were incarcerated:
    I know they suffered a lot. They were extremely thin, malnourished, and the air circulation was terrible. But I didn’t really worry about it. My job was only to check them off the list and then hurry back to my office. I had just enough time to notice that they had become extremely weak.

CHAPTER 4
    T HE S-21 PRISON WAS SET UP IN A FORMER HIGH SCHOOL. It is made up of five buildings shaped like a giant E. Buildings A, B, C, and D, which form the perimeter, rise over three floors, each with wide balconies running alongside the classrooms-turned-jail-cells. In the middle of the structure, the fifth block is a big, single-story house with a covered inner courtyard that divides the space into two distinct areas.
    Bou Meng was incarcerated on the top floor of Building C. For months, he slept on the floor, weak with hunger to the point of feeling dizzy. When lizards crawled across the ceiling, he prayed they would fall on him so that he could eat them. Once, to his horror, the guards threatened to skin him alive. And like Vann Nath, like so many other prisoners in so many other prisons in Democratic Kampuchea, he kept asking himself, “What crime have I committed?”
    Bou Meng shared the cell with about forty other detainees, including, for a while, a few foreigners. They all had long and dirty hair. They were covered in lice and infected sores. And though the guards tolerated no noise, they sometimes whispered among themselves. They were searched every night. Once a week—or maybe every fortnight, he can’t remember exactly—they were hosed down. The floor flooded, so all the prisoners took off their shorts. Everyone was naked. Sometimes the guards would make fun of their genitals, remembers Bou Meng, apologizing to the court for mentioning it. They were treated worse than dogs or pigs, he says.
    Vann Nath was thrown into a cell on the second floor of Building B. In his recollection, the collective “shower” took place twice a week. Getting undressed while in leg irons was difficult. Those damned bindings were so uncomfortable, he remembers with a grimace. It took him thirty minutes just to carry out the maneuver. When a tactless judge asks him how he accomplished it, Vann Nath, as supple as ever, raises a leg to a right angle to demonstrate.
    A month went by in these inhuman conditions. Sitting down without the warden’s permission was forbidden. On a blackboard were chalked orders to not talk or to listen to the guards. The prisoners were served a meager bowl of gruel at eight in the morning and another at eight in the evening. They had to relieve themselves in the same room in which they were shackled, in an old munitions container, an iron box some fifteen centimeters deep. Vann Nath was covered with lesions. He couldn’t stop scratching himself. He, too, hoped that a gecko would fall from the ceiling. But if it did, he’d have to gulp it down right away without being seen by the guard. If not, they would beat him. Unfortunately for him, Vann Nath was too far from the window, where the insects and lizards clustered: “Death loomed over us. People died one after another. They took the bodies away at ten o’clock. We didn’t even care. We were like animals.”
    Vann Nath counted as many as sixty-five prisoners in his cell, lying on the ground in rows, their ankles shackled to a long metal rod. In one month, he saw four of his cellmates die. Sometimes the