Bou Meng, Rare Khmer Rouge Survivor Who Painted to Live, Dies at 85

Bou Meng was imprisoned and tortured at Tuol Sleng where approximately 14,000 prisoners were killed; he survived through his artistic ability while nearly all other detainees perished.

Bou Meng, one of fewer than seven known survivors of Cambodia's Tuol Sleng prison, died this week at eighty-five, closing a rare window into one of the twentieth century's most systematic atrocities. He endured the Khmer Rouge's machinery of terror not by chance but by craft — his ability to paint portraits for the regime's leadership spared him from the fate of roughly fourteen thousand others who perished within those walls. For decades after, he bore the particular burden of the witness: testifying before tribunals, speaking to historians, and carrying the sensory memory of a place that doc

Bou Meng, Rare Khmer Rouge Survivor Who Painted to Live, Dies at 85

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