Free Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison by David P. Chandler Page A

have marched from place to place singing revolutionary songs. They would have been allowed very little sleep. Like newly enrolled members of a religious movement, they were expected to emerge from the school with an intensified focus and a shared sense of exaltation. 61
The cohort of workers at the prison appears geographically cohe-sive. Of those who completed biographical statements, one hundred one of the men and thirty-two of the women had been born and raised in the region designated as Sector 25, north of Phnom Penh, while twenty-nine came from Sector 31, three from Sector 32, thirteen from Sector 33—all northwest of the capital—and one from Sector 41, to the north. They were drawn from military units that were relocated to the capital in 1975.
Sector 25 was a thickly settled, relatively prosperous area housing thousands of Chinese and Sino-Khmer market gardeners and town dwellers as well as a majority of ethnic Khmer rice farmers. In the 1960s the region had been represented in the National Assembly by Khieu Samphan, who was popular in the electorate and encouraged followers to join the clandestine Communist Party. “Everyone in the region loved Khieu Samphan,” Him Huy has recalled. Four years after his flight to the maquis in 1967, when many had thought him dead, Samphan became a key member of the Party Center. Until his defection to the Phnom Penh government in 1998, he was a formidable, malevolent survivor. 62
In summary, making an exception for the “older brothers,” most of whom sprang from Cambodia’s minuscule intelligentsia, S-21 workers were of similar age, class, experience, and geographic origins. They also resembled the majority of the people incarcerated in the prison.
Prisoners at S-21
The number of prisoners at S-21 varied, reflecting the waxing and wan-ing of the purges that swept through DK from mid-1976 onward. These are discussed in detail in chapter 3. The prison’s maximum capacity, reached in 1977, was around 1,500 prisoners. On 20 April of that year, the prison held 1,242 prisoners, of whom 105 were female. It was probably in this period that Nhem En saw truckloads of prisoners arrive at S-21 and be taken off almost immediately to be killed, without being photographed or interrogated, presumably because they were considered unimportant and there was no space in the prison. 63
At other times, S-21 held only a few hundred people. In 1975, fewer than 200 people were held by santebal. The number rose to 1,622 in 1976, with more than three-quarters of these arrested between May, when serious purges began and the Tuol Sleng facility was brought into operation, and the end of the year. In 1977, when many DK government offices and all geographic zones were purged, at least 6,300 people entered the prison. On some days, more than 300 prisoners were brought to the prison; on others, none came in. 64 From mid-February to mid-April 1977 alone, 1,249 men and women were brought in dur-ing purges of the Northern and Northwestern Zones.
In 1978 prisoners’ photographs included placards giving their names and numbers in a monthly admission sequence. Entry records, although incomplete, suggest that at least 4,352 prisoners came to S-21 in 1978. Only 59 prisoners are listed in the scattered records for May, although the mug shot numbers for that month go up to 791. Although there are many lacunae in the photo archive for 1978, the highest number for all the months except May and August (for which no photographs survive) corresponds roughly with the entry records. I have added 732 to the recorded May entries, to arrive at a total estimate of 5,084 prisoners in 1978.
The high intake from April through June reflected the purges in the eastern part of Cambodia. By the end of the year, the prison population had dropped dramatically. In December 1978, as a note from Huy to Duch suggests, there were 279 prisoners in the “big prison” (presumably the main, western buildings), as well as 45 “Vietnamese,”