Bou Meng

Bou Meng (Khmer: ប៊ូ ម៉េង, romanized: Bu Méng [ɓuː meːŋ]; 4 April 1941 – 14 August 2026) was one of only seven known adult survivors of the Khmer Rouge imprisonment in the S-21 Tuol Sleng camp, where 20,000 Cambodians were tortured and executed. He was arrested with his wife, Ma Yoeun, in 1976 and taken into S-21; they never met again after then. Bou Meng was tortured for weeks, with many kinds of torture devices (electric shock, bamboo sticks, whips, rattans, cart axles, etc.) and he had to fabricate confessions. He was spared from being slaughtered only because he was a highly skilled painter. His wife, according to the records of Tuol Sleng, was tortured and killed on August 16, 1977. His children ended up in a children's center, where they eventually starved to death. In 2002, he was believed to be dead. In January 2002, Cambodian newspaper The Phnom Penh Post wrote that he had died in the 1990s, while Cambodian magazine Searching for the truth wrote that he had "disappeared". When Bou Meng found out that people thought that he was dead, he went back to S-21 (which had been converted into a museum).