Some of the most heart-rending photos I've ever seen

i have to confess, these really got to me...

Inmates at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where at least 14,000 people were tortured to death or sent to killing fields. Before killing the prisoners, the Khmer Rouge photographed, tortured and extracted written confessions from their victims.

Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide


Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide


Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide

He had a job to do, and he did it supremely well, under threat of death, within earshot of screams of torture: methodically photographing Khmer Rouge prisoners and producing a haunting collection of mug shots that has become the visual symbol of Cambodia’s mass killings.

“I’m just a photographer; I don’t know anything,” he said he told the newly arrived prisoners as he removed their blindfolds and adjusted the angles of their heads. But he knew, as they did not, that every one of them would be killed.

“I had my job, and I had to take care of my job,” he said in a recent interview. “Each of us had our own responsibilities. I wasn’t allowed to speak with prisoners.”

[...]

In the interview, Mr. Nhem En spoke with pride of living up to the exacting standards of a boss who was a master of negative reinforcement.

“It was really hard, my job,” he said. “I had to clean, develop and dry the pictures on my own and take them to Duch [his commandant at the prison, Kaing Geuk Eav, known as Duch] by my own hand. I couldn’t make a mistake. If one of the pictures was lost I would be killed.”

looking at those innocent, haunted faces is almost overwhelming... we must dedicate ourselves to insuring that horrors like this, whether in the killing fields of cambodia, the slaughtering fields of darfur, the concentration camps of germany, or the neighborhoods of baghdad, are halted, now and forever...

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