An illustration of the typical conditions found in Tuol Sleng Prison, a former high school ...

An illustration of the typical conditions found in Tuol Sleng Prison, a former high school transformed into a Khmer Rouge facility used for torturing and killing between 14,000 and 17,000 'enemies' of the revolution which included former government members, intellectuals, religious groups and in the final years of Khmer Rouge control, fellow Khmer Rouge party members, including the Prison's former torturers. The illustration is part of a series of 15 undertaken by Vann Nath, one of only seven survivors of Tuol Sleng, and depicts a prisoner, too weak to walk, being carried on a sling to be tortured further. The French caption under the illustration reads 'Carrying the dying prisoner to the interrogation room'. Arrested in his home town of Battambang in December 1977, Vann Nath suffered six months of beatings, torture and starvation at Tuol Sleng and only survived when his captors discovered he was a painter and put him to work painting portraits of Pol Pot. Accompanied by the screams of other prisoners being tortured, Vann completed eight or nine large portraits over six months before he was reassigned to assist the prison's stone sculptor carve likenesses of Pol Pot. He was still working in the prison on 11 January 1979 when the Vietnamese invasion reached the outskirts of Phnom Penh, scattering the prison guards and making him a free man. Vann Nath's wife also survived the Pol Pot regime, although their two children died of disease and starvation.