The Master of Confessions Read Online Free PDF Page B

prisoners who had blood taken died. Hor then received a report with a list of names from the medical unit. I checked those names off my list and that was the end of it.
    Suor Thi’s testimony triggers a gasp in the gallery, but the soundproof glass wall separating the former registrar and the tribunal from the public prevents the court from hearing it.
    The media go after the interrogators and the guards, because theirs is the raw story; they can provide the narrative and imagery behind the brutality and killing. The media is less interested in Suor Thi, even though he personifies the silent bureaucracy that underpinned the crime. Suor Thi has the accuracy of an accountant and the cold meticulousness of his former boss, Duch. No one spoke to more people condemned to die than Suor Thi.
    IN ONE OF THE PHOTOS taken inside one of the group cells, you can make out a tangle of men lying on the floor in the background. One of them, his arm folded beneath his head, seems to have a blanket. In the foreground, another man, in a shirt, is sitting up and looking at the lens.
    â€œI don’t see how that man could be sitting. It wasn’t allowed. Even crying wasn’t allowed,” says Chum Mey, flushed with anger.
    Along with Bou Meng and Vann Nath, Chum Mey, aged seventy-six, is the third and final still-living survivor of S-21. In the courtroom, he stands up and, with his hands pressed together in front of his face in sampeah , the traditional Khmer greeting, he turns toward the Buddhist monks sitting in the front row, then to the rest of the public gallery, which on this particular day is filled with students. When he tells the story of the exodus of April 1975, during which his two-year-old son died, no detail seems to him too trivial. Chum Mey has repeated his story so many times over the past thirty-five years that he remembers even the smallest detail. The spirited, intense, uninterrupted flow of his speech contrasts sharply with Vann Nath’s sober and sparse monologue. When he reconstructs the terrible days he spent in the individual interrogation cell, Chum Mey stares ahead, his eyes filled with pain. When he describes how thin he was, his voice rises at the end of his sentence to a pitch so high it sounds like a soprano’s vocal scale. He describes hearing voices shouting at him: “You sons of bitches, the Angkar will destroy you all! Don’t worry about your families!” His hands were tied, his eyes blindfolded, his ankles in chains.
    Chum Mey remembers sitting in a room into which he had been dragged by the ear from his cell. Someone took off the blindfold that had covered his eyes from the cell to the interrogation room. He saw fresh blood on the ground. His interrogators asked him how many people in his network had joined the CIA and the KGB. Chum Mey had no idea what the CIA was. Or the KGB. He had heard those terms before, but he didn’t know what they meant. For the Khmer Rouge, the enemies of its enemies were also its enemies. Thus, they denounced both the American CIA and the Soviet KGB. The Americans were the imperialists par excellence , of course. But the Soviets and their Vietnamese allies were dangerous, expansionist reactionaries with whom the Chinese and their Khmer Rouge allies were engaged in a struggle for the mantle of international Communism. As the “highest tower of proletarian truth,” the Communist Party of Kampuchea considered Vietnam and the Soviet Union like “bones stuck in their throat that had to be removed,” as Duch wrote in a letter to a very high-ranking prisoner.
    All this gave a humble handyman like Chum Mey a great many enemies to learn about in short order. Formerly a tractor mechanic in Phnom Penh, he had been working maintenance in a clothing factory when he was arrested. He tried to show deference to his captors by using reverent forms of address, even calling them the Khmer equivalent of “sir.” He got a hundred lashes for