Living Under Khmer Rouge Regime
At the time of his arrest on January 7, 1978, Vann Nath was working in a rice field in his home province of Battambang like many other Battambang locals. The Khmer Rouge took him to Wat Kandal, a Buddhist temple used as a detainment center. They told him that he was accused of violating the moral code of the organization of Angkar. He did not understand what that meant.
A week later, he was transferred and deported to a security prison in Phnom Penh. This security prison is known as S-21 by the Khmer Rouge and it was formerly a high school known as Chao Ponhea Yat high school. There, people are interrogated and executed on a daily basis. Towards the fall of the Khmer Rouge and the invasion of the Vietnamese army in 1979, only seven prisoners made out of the prison alive. Vann Nath was one of them.
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