These People Were Arrested by the Khmer Rouge and Never Seen Again

In April of 1975, a communist guerrilla army know as the Khmer Rouge captured the Cambodian capital of Phnom Phen and established one of the most violent dictatorships in modern history. Led by a Marxist revolutionary named Pol Pot, the group immediately set about evacuating the country’s cities, and forcing everyone to work on collective farms. Central to this initiative, was a brutal system of incarceration and torture for anyone who resisted.

In Phnom Penh, a former secondary school was converted into an enormous prison known as Security Prison 21, or S-21 for short. There, an estimated 20,000 people were imprisoned until the regime’s downfall in 1979. It’s believed that over 18,000 of these prisoners were murdered, which is…