Chum Mey: The Man Who Repaired His Torturers' Typewriters — One of Seven Survivors of Tuol Sleng

Born around 1930 in Prey Veng Province, Chum Mey was an ordinary mechanic before the war made him one of the very few men to survive S-21, the most notorious torture center of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Chum Mey, one of seven survivors of S-21 prison, photographed at Tuol Sleng. © DC-Cam

In the memory of the Cambodian genocide, there are coincidences that read like verdicts. A broken typewriter, sitting on a torturer's desk, and an entire human life pivoting on it. It was this absurd, terrible mechanism that saved Chum Mey at a moment when everything around him had been designed to destroy him.

Before 1975, Chum Mey lived in Chbar Mon, in Kampong Speu Province, and later in Phnom Penh, where he worked as a mechanic — repairing tractors, vehicles, any machine brought to him. He was an unremarkable man, in a country about to lose millions of them.

April 17, 1975: The Evacuation

When the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, Chum Mey was forcibly evacuated along with his family, swept into the millions of city dwellers driven onto the country's roads. The chaos of that forced march already cost him dearly: his two-year-old son, exhausted by the journey, died of illness along the way. He was buried in a makeshift grave by the roadside, with no ceremony possible.

Over the following years, Chum Mey survived by working in agricultural cooperatives, repairing whatever needed fixing — tools, carts, pumps. His manual skill, which made him useful to the regime, did not protect him indefinitely. In October 1978, he was arrested. The accusation was as vague as it was lethal: espionage on behalf of the CIA and the KGB.

Twelve Days and Twelve Nights

Brought blindfolded to Tuol Sleng — the former Ponhea Yat high school converted into a detention center under the code name S-21 — Chum Mey was locked in a brick cell roughly two meters by one, shackled to the floor. What followed, he would later describe as the longest twelve days of his life.

His interrogators demanded he confess to working for the CIA and the KGB — two organizations he claims he had never heard of before his capture. Faced with his silence, the torture intensified methodically: repeated beatings with bamboo switches across his entire body, fingers broken as he tried to shield his face, toenails ripped out with pliers. When he still refused to sign the fabricated confession, his torturers subjected him to electric shocks, delivered through a simple wire plugged into a 220-volt wall socket.

"If you refuse to confess, I'll beat you to death. You must tell the truth, then I won't kill you. If not, I must kill you."

These are, word for word, the threats Chum Mey would recount decades later before the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. He eventually signed the confession demanded of him — an entirely invented account of counter-revolutionary activities, as the paranoid logic of S-21 required, where confession always preceded execution, never innocence.

A Broken Typewriter

What saved Chum Mey from execution had nothing heroic about it: it was a mechanical coincidence. One of the typewriters used by interrogators to record extracted confessions broke down. Recognized as a trained mechanic, Chum Mey was pulled from his cell and ordered to repair it. He succeeded — then went on to repair two more typewriters, several sewing machines, and a water pump for the prison complex.

Aware that his usefulness was the only thing keeping him alive, Chum Mey deliberately slowed down every repair, stretching out the time separating him from death. This strategy, as lucid as it was desperate, worked for months, even as thousands of prisoners around him were systematically executed after their confessions.

"I was the only one who knew how to repair the typewriters."

January 7, 1979: Liberation, and Horror

As Vietnamese forces approached Phnom Penh in late 1978, conditions inside Tuol Sleng grew chaotic. The guards, gripped by panic, did not head straight for the prison but stopped first at the central market. It was in this confusion that the remaining guards rounded up the surviving prisoners and forced them out of the compound on January 7, 1979 — the very day the capital fell.

Chum Mey escaped in the chaos. Along the way he crossed paths with another mechanic, Ung Pech, whom he had known before the regime and recognized at S-21 without ever daring to speak to him, for fear of being caught. The two men fled together, at gunpoint.

At Ang Snuol, during this flight, Chum Mey was miraculously reunited with his wife and surviving child. But the reprieve was short-lived. That same day, amid gunfire and the disintegrating Khmer Rouge guard, his wife and their two-month-old infant — born while the family was separated in labor camps — were shot dead in a rice paddy. Chum Mey himself narrowly escaped the gunfire and found himself separated from the rest of the fleeing group.

"I cried every day for the wife and children I lost."

Of his four children and his wife, none survived the regime. Chum Mey found himself alone, with no family left, in a country drained of nearly a quarter of its population.

Bearing Witness: A Life's Work

For years after 1979, Chum Mey could not bring himself to return to the site of his ordeal. Gradually, he began visiting the Tuol Sleng genocide museum again, much like fellow survivor Vann Nath, the painter who created works there depicting the abuses he himself had endured. Today, Chum Mey sells his autobiography to visitors and patiently answers their questions, day after day, from the entrance of the former prison.

In 2009, he testified before the UN-backed Khmer Rouge Tribunal at the trial of Kaing Guek Eav, known as 'Duch,' the former head of S-21, accused of overseeing the torture and extermination of some 15,000 people. Before the court, Chum Mey described the abuse he suffered — the torn-out nails, the electric shocks, the repeated beatings — with a clinical precision that left the courtroom stunned.

In 2016, he testified a second time, at the trial of Nuon Chea, the regime's second-in-command. There he detailed an additional humiliation inflicted on prisoners: when bodily accidents occurred in their cells, they were forced to clean their own waste with their tongues, under threat of further punishment.

Forgiving Without Forgetting

Perhaps what stands out most about Chum Mey, beyond the account of horror, is his stance toward his former torturers. He has publicly stated that he has forgiven them, while never ceasing to testify, to write, to pass on what he witnessed. It is a complex position, one not necessarily shared by other survivors, but one that speaks to how some genocide survivors have chosen to carry their memory — not as a burden of hatred, but as a duty of truth.

On the work of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, whose trials stretched on for years and resulted in only a handful of convictions, Chum Mey was more critical, estimating that the justice delivered amounted to only about seventy percent of what was needed. He nonetheless praised the value of the process for collective memory and for preventing future atrocities, while regretting its cost and slowness.

Now in his nineties, Chum Mey remains one of the last living voices able to recount, from the inside, what S-21 truly was. His autobiography, Survivor: The Triumph of an Ordinary Man in the Khmer Rouge Genocide, published by DC-Cam in 2012 and translated into several languages, remains one of the rare written testimonies authored directly by a survivor of the deadliest prison of the Pol Pot regime. 

Editorial Note

This article draws on Chum Mey's autobiography, Survivor: The Triumph of an Ordinary Man in the Khmer Rouge Genocide (DC-Cam, 2012, translated by Sim Sorya and Kimsroy Sokvisal), his testimonies before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) in 2009 and 2016, and the archives of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), founded in 1995. Of the roughly 12,000 to 17,000 people detained at S-21 between 1976 and 1979, only seven survived. Sources: dccam.org · cambodiatribunal.org