Bou Meng

Bou Meng
ប៊ូ ម៉េង
Bou Meng presenting the book about himself (written by Huy Vannak) and the DVD inside Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, April 26, 2018.
Born	1941 (age 82–83)[1][2] Kampong Cham Province, Cambodia, French Indochina
Nationality	Cambodian
Occupation	Artist[1]
Known for	Survivor of the Tuol Sleng prison camp
Spouse	Ma Yoeun[3]

Bou Meng (Khmer: ប៊ូ ម៉េង, Bu Méng [ɓuː meːŋ]; born 1941^[2]) is one of only seven known adult survivors^[4] of the Khmer Rouge imprisonment in the S-21 Tuol Sleng camp, where 20,000 Cambodians were tortured and executed.^[5] 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,^[6] 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.^[7] His wife, according to the records of Tuol Sleng, was tortured and killed on August 16, 1977.^[3] His children ended up in a children's center, where they eventually starved to death.^[8]

In 2002, he was believed to be dead. In January 2002, Cambodian newspaper 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).^[8]