Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (29 page)

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sacres in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966, the military torturers in Argentina, and those who organized the mass killings in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s. As a twentieth-century phenomenon, S-21 was by no means unique.
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Even so, when we sift through the dossiers from the prison the scale of horror is overwhelming. Words fail us. A similar feeling of helplessness swept over the French historian Alain Forest when he visited the site in 1982. “It’s stronger than me,” he wrote, “and there’s no chance of thinking or writing about it. I pull my head instinctively down into my shoulders.”
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When Boris Pasternak toured collective farms in the USSR in the 1930s, when thousands of people were dying of starvation, he recoiled also. “What I saw,” he wrote, “could not be expressed in words. There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness. I fell ill.”
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When we confront so many extinguished histories, we need to say something to make sense of S-21 and to bear witness to the victims; but, as Jonathan Spence has reminded us, coming at the issue from another angle, “It is one of the tragedies of writing about tragedy that the weight and texture of words matter unduly, for suffering needs a measure of grace to be bearable to others.”
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In a sense, Mai Lam’s effort to turn S-21 into a museum was an attempt to make its raw terror “bearable to others.” The map of skulls that he designed for the museum is so grotesque that it increases our distance from the prison. In the same way, the ersatz stupa that Mai Lam erected at Choeung Ek imposes a spurious Buddhist reading onto the skulls displayed inside it. Anything we say or write about S-21, or about the Holocaust, has the effect of softening and cleaning what went on. This is as true of the banal, repetitive, mean-spirited cruelty of S-21, and of Mai Lam’s museum, as it is of the facilities in other times and places to which S-21 has been fruitfully compared. Words fail us also because, as Judith Shklar has written, “We talk around cruelty because we do not know how to talk about it.”
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Why, then, do we persist? Are there advantages to getting close to the terror and intimacy of S-21? Does writing about its victims make their sufferings “bearable to others?” If so, who are the beneficiaries, besides my readers and myself? Historians are always invasive. In these pages I have been an uninvited visitor to S-21, inducing my evidence from the traces left behind by the victims and victimizers at the prison. In the process, I have been talking “around cruelty,” and this is a perilous exercise, as Shklar has pointed out: “For all our wealth of historical experience, we do not know how to think about victimhood. Almost everything one might say would be unfair, self-serving, undignifi untrue, self-deluding, contradictory or dangerous. Perhaps the best intellectual response is simply to write the history of the victims and victimizers as truthfully . . . as possible.”
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In this book I have tried my best to follow Shklar’s humane suggestion, so as to bear witness to the victims, to grasp how S-21 could come to be, and to consider how similar institutions have come to life in the past and might reappear again. To perform these tasks, I have had to overcome my reluctance to move in close, my reluctance to share responsibility for what happened, and my eagerness at all costs to maintain my balance. I need to find the words that fit, and what happened at the prison continually overwhelms the words. As a historian and a student of literature I have tried, over the years, to control the data I deal with and to comprehend the writings that I read. When I have immersed myself in the S-21 archive, the terror lurking inside it has pushed me around, blunted my skills, and eroded my self-assurance. The experience at times has been akin to drowning.

Writing about state-induced violence in Argentina in the 1970s, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco has taken issue with people who were reluctant to confront and analyze the phenomenon. These timid fi he writes, have asserted that “the materials are simply too sinister for any form of detached analysis. Any attempt at analyzing the materials would invariably do violence to an immensely complex and delicate subject. In the end, analysis simply reproduces the discourse of violence, albeit in another idiom.” Suárez-Orozco argues that the analysis of hor-ror must continue, even though the materials in question are “so unnerving that no distancing from the terror can ever be truly achieved,” not because understanding what happened will allow us to pardon the perpetrators but because “terror is part of the everydayness of life.”
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By confronting terror, he suggests, we are confronting something that is not only “out there” but also inside ourselves. S-21 is closer to all of us than we would like to think. Along with trying to write the history of the place as “truthfully as possible,” therefore, I have tried to penetrate the everydayness that Suárez-Orozco describes. If “S-21” in a sense is everywhere and we are all inside it, the prison becomes simultaneously harder to cope with and easier to explain.

In 1971 the British journalist Gitta Sereny spent several weeks interviewing Franz Stangl, the SS colonel who commanded the extermination camp at Treblinka, where over a million people, the vast majority

of them Jews, were put to death from 1941 to 1943. Stangl was arrested in 1967 in Brazil, where he had been living under his own name. When Sereny talked to him, he had stood trial in Düsseldorf for his activities in World War II and had been sentenced to life imprisonment. He died of a heart attack in prison in 1972, after Sereny’s interviews with him and before the publication of her book.

In the interviews Stangl apparently struggled to be helpful and to align what remained of his Catholic upbringing and his honor as a career policeman with what he had seen and done in World War II. Sereny was courteous with him but pulled no punches. Asked at one stage why the Nazis had exterminated the Jews, Stangl replied that it was because the Nazis “wanted their money.” Sereny then asked him, “If they were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, all the cruelty?” and he answered, “To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies. To make it possible for them to do what they did.”

Over time, Stangl assured her, the workers at Treblinka became conditioned to performing horrible tasks, so long as the horrors were sanc-tioned and encouraged and so long as the victims meant nothing to them “personally” and could be thought of as outside the human race. In a similar fashion, the “ordinary men” of the SS reserve police battalion described by Christopher Browning, after some initial aversion, were able to massacre thousands of Jews in Poland in 1941.
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For workers at S-21, a similar toughening process was hastened and intensified not only by the supposed ubiquity of “enemies” in Cambodia but also by the merciless discipline of the place. If they refused to work or worked too slowly, the guards and interrogators at S-21, unlike their Nazi counterparts, might become victims overnight. Their survival soon became a corollary of hard work. As Kok Sros has recalled, “I tried to work my hardest. If I died, so be it. If I died after I had worked very hard, it would be better than if I hadn’t tried hard enough.”
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For Kok Sros, Stangl, and perhaps Browning’s “ordinary men,” the importance of doing a good job eclipsed the nature of what they were doing. As the director of Treblinka, Stangl believed that he had been able to prevent worse atrocities by working hard and by adopting a conscientious, even-handed command style. “Of course, thoughts [about what was happening at Treblinka] came,” he told Sereny. “But I forced them away. I made myself concentrate on work, work and again work.”
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Even so, he said, he needed several glasses of brandy every night to get to sleep.

After noting her agreement with what Stangl had just said, Sereny wrote: “To achieve the extermination of these millions of men, women and children the Nazis committed not only physical but spiritual mur-der: on those they killed, on those who did the killing, on those who knew the killing was being done and also, to some extent . . . on all of us, who were alive and thinking beings at the time.”
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Sereny’s troubling comment suggests that to achieve the murders at Treblinka, the Nazis could count on the spiritual deadness of the world at large. In a similar sense, I suggest, we allowed S-21 to happen because most of us are indifferent to phenomena of this kind happening far away to other people. Evil, we like to think, occurs elsewhere.
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Browning, Sereny, and other authors, however, suggest that under extreme conditions, such as those that applied in World War II, boundaries of this kind become impossible to draw. Primo Levi has written that a “gray zone” enveloped many of the guards and prisoners at Auschwitz. Browning refers to the “zone” from the point of view of perpetrators as a “murky world of mixed motives, conflicting emotions and priorities, reluctant choices and self-serving opportunism and accommodation wedded to self-deception and denial.” At S-21, in one sense, there was no such zone, because there was too little connivance among victims, perpetrators, and the outside world to construct it. Yet although prisoners at S-21 could never become interrogators or guards, workers at S-21 could become prisoners overnight. In this sense, everyone in S-21 inhabited a gray zone all the time.
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To complicate things further, we need to remember that the people working in the Nazi camps and at S-21 were not inherently brutal or authoritarian. Most of them appear to have been unexceptional, often poorly educated men and women who were cast in brutal roles. How much free choice, peer pressure, obedience, and ambition were involved in what they did is impossible to determine. What we know about the workers at S-21 points in most cases, as Browning’s research would suggest, to their ordinariness and banality. Bonded with people like themselves and abjectly respectful of those in charge, the workers at S-21, like the prisoners, were trapped inside a merciless place and a pitiless scenario.

To be entrapped like this, and to act in this way, does not require the context of Treblinka, Auschwitz, or S-21. The process was chillingly demonstrated, under relatively genteel conditions, in Palo Alto, California, a few years before S-21 began its operations. In the so-called Zimbardo experiments in 1971, a group of Stanford University graduate

students, all volunteers, were placed in a role-playing situation that sought to duplicate the culture, practices, and power relations of an American prison. As the “guards” began to relish their empowerment and the “prisoners” became fearful and dehumanized, the experiment spun out of control. It was cut short before anyone was seriously hurt.
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Another sequence of experiments conducted in the United States in the early 1960s by Stanley Milgram provides additional insights. Volunteers in New Haven, Connecticut, were asked by the “educational psychologist” to sit at a console and act as “teachers” (college students were expressly forbidden to take part). They were then asked to deliver what they were told were electric shocks in response to “incorrect” replies given to questions put by the “psychologist” to unseen but audi-ble “students” in another room. In fact, there was no electricity transmitted by the buttons the teachers pressed, and the students were actors hired by Milgram. As the students’ “errors” multiplied, the intensity of the shocks increased until some of the teachers were delivering what they were told were extremely painful, dangerous doses of electricity— a fact seemingly confirmed by thumps, cries, and eerie silences from the adjoining room. Over several days, only one in three of the teachers objected to what was happening or broke off the experiment. Over the next two years, several variables were introduced into the experiments, including moving them to the working-class city of Bridgeport, allowing physical contact between teachers and students, introducing a greater number of women into the teacher group, and removing the psychologist from the room. Most of the results remained consistent. With rare exceptions, the experiments showed, as Alan Elms has written, that “two-thirds of a sample of average Americans were willing to shock an innocent victim until the poor man was screaming for his life,

and to go on shocking him well after he lapsed into silence.”
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In another study of the experiments, John Darley suggests that the obedience of the teachers was keyed to the presence of the experi-menters, who were asked to validate extended violence. Left to their own devices, Darley suggests, the teachers would not have administered the shocks. There is thus a gap, as he vigorously argues, between Milgram’s teachers and people who commit atrocities. He adds, however, that socializing people toward greater violence might be merely a mat-ter of time.

Alexander Hinton has argued that unquestioning obedience of the sort displayed most of the time in these experiments occupies a particularly strong position in Cambodian culture. I would agree that the