This 80 page book tells the harrowing story of Bou Meng, a survivor from Toul Sleng, Khmer Rouge Prison S-21 in Cambodia. "It offers a glimpse through a keyhole into the dark interior of the Khmer Rouge, who were responsible for the deaths of as many as one-fourth of Cambodia's population from 1975-1979. Bou Meng was save, after weeks of torture, because he was an artist. He was taken from a row of shackled prisoners and put to work painting portraits of the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, and he continued, as other were tortured and killed, until the prison was hastily evacuated in the face of the Vietnamese invasion. Tuol Sleng has been converted into a Museum of Genocide, and its lower floors are filled with hundreds of portraits of victims, taken at the moment they arrived. Bou Meng visits from time to time and when he does he is surrounded by the images of ghosts. As he talks, standing in front of a panel of portraits, his face becomes one of them, stunned and questioning. 'They all died', he said. 'Among them only I am alive.' His survival, when almost every one of the prisoners died, seems still to be too much to comprehend. Bou Meng's story offers a rare and valuable glimpse into a world of savagery and into the life of a seemingly ordinary man who survived an extraordinary fate."

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