| The Khmer Rouge's blunt renaming of the building 'S-21' was unintentionally eloquent, prefiguring the way in which the 14,000 Cambodians who passed through the school gates and died inside were themselves deprived of names, becoming numbers. |
 |
The grim irony of their fate was that their killers - the self-styled enemies of bureaucracy - were themselves expert and meticulous bureaucrats, who kept not only a written record of each prisoner, including copies of confessions, but also a photograph of every one. |