The Lost Executioner by Nic Dunlop
(Bloomsbury, £16.99)
Nic Dunlop’s compelling addition to the literature of the Cambodian holocaust examines not only the banality of evil but also its ambiguity, and the resulting doubt and confusion among perpetrators and victims in the aftermath of one of the greatest crimes in history.
Like many of those who visit the Tuol Sleng museum in Phnom Penh, Dunlop was haunted by the display of curiously beautiful individual photographs of some of the 20,000 men, women and children who died there when it was the notorious Tuol Sleng prison. He became obsessed with finding Comrade Duch, the executioner of the title and commandant of the prison, who had disappeared after the overthrow of Pol Pot by the invading Vietnamese army in 1979. Twenty years later, while with a mine-clearance team in a Khmer Rouge zone in rural Cambodia, Dunlop meets a man called Hang Pin wearing a white T-shirt with the initials ARC, for American Refugee Committee. He identifies him as Duch. It turns out that Duch—real name Kaing Guek Eav—is as devout a Christian as he was a Communist. He is now in jail awaiting trial.
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