In pursuit of a total socialist order that eradicated the individual and shunned all Western influence, the Khmer Rouge bombed the national bank and symbolically burned its currency in the streets. They turned the National Library into a horse stable and pig farm, and nearly all of the books — both Khmer and French — were indiscriminately destroyed or used for cooking fires, toilet paper, or rolling cigarettes. Røed-Larsen includes a famous photograph of three young Khmer Rouge cadres standing around a torn-up copy of Dante’s Inferno, smoking cigarettes rolled from its pages, a look of weary amazement in their eyes.
Knowing that religious traditions could pose the most serious threat to their plan to socially engineer the populace, the Khmer Rouge forced the Buddhist monkhood, the spiritual backbone of Khmer society, to disband. Their sutras were seized and burned; their wats were turned into granaries or fish sauce factories, the altars pushed aside to make room for great barrels of fermenting anchovies. The Khmer Rouge leadership wisely co-opted several familiar Buddhist notions — such as selflessness and transcendence — for use in their extreme form of Marxist ideology, with spiritual nirvana replaced by the perfect embodiment of the state, Angkar.
Yet monks were by no means the only targets of the Khmer Rouge. Intellectuals, academics, artists — anyone with a perceived connection to the West, including those spotted simply wearing spectacles — were all rounded up, tortured, and, in most cases, summarily executed. Eventually, in a sign that the system was rotting from within, the paranoid Khmer Rouge leadership began to turn on their own ranks, arresting hundreds of Khmer Rouge cadres suspected of being traitors to the Angkar cause. Those who did the arresting were then arrested, and so on.
Røed-Larsen wonders (656) why, given their disdain for historical transcripts, the Khmer Rouge kept such comprehensive records at the Tuol Sleng, or “S-21,” security prison, a former Phnom Penh high school that had been converted into a torture camp. The place was run with astonishing efficiency by Comrade Duch, a former mathematician. Perhaps sensing the chasm left by the erasure of the written word, Comrade Duch began to forge a new history, a new kind of truth.
The S-21 documentation division, including a young photographer named Nhem En, meticulously recorded every arrival to the camp. Following strict orders, Nhem En would remove the new prisoner’s blindfold and then take a series of photos: facing the camera, in profile, occasionally from the back. After a prominent prisoner died of torture, he would also take postmortem photos, the pools of blood like black ink against the white cement floors. Nhem En faced immediate execution if the photos were not up to Comrade Duch’s exacting standards. He thus took great care with the lighting, the placement of the prisoner in the frame, the shallow depth of field. His art kept him alive, but it also became something alive itself.
Fig. 4.11. Tuol Sleng prisoner #4816
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 658
Of the seventeen thousand prisoners who passed through Tuol Sleng, only seven survived. Nhem En’s black-and-white photographs of the prisoners remained in a file cabinet in the school’s old cafeteria after the Khmer Rouge fled the city, though at some point the photographs became separated from their files, so many of the images live on in a liminal, unidentified state. A man resembling Tien is pictured among these photographs, #4816, although, without proper documentation, one cannot be sure if it is actually him or someone else entirely:
Yet even just this act of immortalizing a prisoner in a photo, filled with its soft palette of greys and marked by the subject’s vacant stare of simultaneous comprehension and disbelief, was more attention than the vast majority of the regime’s victims received. Most were never documented by their killers. They slipped into death anonymously, silently, leaving no proof of their existence or of their abrupt demise.
It is here that Røed-Larsen (and by extension we) enter the realm of conjecture. Following the “liberation” of Phnom Penh, Raksmey was able to disguise himself as a peasant and evade execution, presumably because he was mostly unknown to the population. After walking out of the city with the rest of its inhabitants, he was sent to work up north in the rice fields in the Preah Vihear region, near Tbaeng Meanchey district. He survived only by completely abandoning his identity and pretending he was deaf and mute — for more than two years, he did not speak. It must be said, his deafness was a dangerous choice, for those with disabilities were also culled. Raksmey, however, compensated for this with tireless work in the fields, and thus ingratiated himself with the Khmer Rouge district leaders, who were less ruthless than in other sectors. As Røed-Larsen writes, “Cruelty is always local. . [it] depends not upon the system which creates it but the hand that serves it” (660).
In the evenings, Raksmey would smile and clap as his exhausted comrades chanted songs pledging their allegiance to Angkar. When the Khmer Rouge cadres gave lectures on the triumphs of the Kampuchea state, Raksmey made sure his head was downcast, his eyes dull and empty, so that the chiefs would not detect any hint of life or understanding in them. He thus lived two lives: a life inside the crevices of his mind, where he unwound particles and debated the theories of subatomic quantum mechanics late into the night with an apparition of Dr. Salam, and another that comprised his outward actions during the day, where he was deaf and mute. A simpleton. Eager to please, eager to serve the great and powerful Angkar. Even in the darkest hours of the night, he made sure that his two lives never crossed paths, never greeted each other.
“Angkar!” he would yell with the others in a mangled voice of incomprehension. It was the only word he allowed to pass his lips — two declaratory vowels draped in vague consonants. It was not so much a word as a breath and release: “Ang-kar! Ang-kar!”
During the monsoon season of 1977, he and two others managed to escape their work camp by foot, over the Dângrêk Mountains and into Thailand. One of the men died en route after stepping on a land mine, and the other succumbed to illness as soon as he reached the safety of Thailand.
In Bangkok, Raksmey took up a research assistantship in the physics department of Chulalongkorn University for Dr. Randall Horwich, the friend of a colleague at CERN. Dr. Horwich must have been surprised at who had crawled into his lab from Democratic Kampuchea, which at the time remained an impenetrable mystery to the world. It was a fortuitous arrival that would help to jump-start Dr. Horwich’s career. Together, they co-published an important theoretical paper in 1979 on the mass of up quarks in the Pakistan Journal of Pure and Applied Physics. This paper precipitated Dr. Horwich’s move to CERN in 1980, where he would work on the UA1 experiment, which definitively discovered W and Z bosons and won its research heads a Nobel Prize.
If nothing else, Raksmey’s reentrance into the world of record keeping did yield valuable evidence of his survivaclass="underline" along with the theoretical paper, Per Røed-Larsen managed to track down his letter of hire at Chulalongkorn, several pay stubs, and a university work transcript. There is also one improbable document that stands out from the rest: a handwritten letter, purportedly written by Raksmey to his friend Sebastian Ouellette, a fellow researcher at CERN.