Cambodia's National Library Used as a Piggery by Khmer Rouge

80% of Cambodia's Books Destroyed- 1975-1979.

Cell doors, Security Prison 21 (S-21), Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia April 1975 to January 1979 evacuating cities to establish a radical agrarian society. Less than 20 percent of the nation’s books survived. The National library was used as a pigsty for the duration of the Khmer Rouge regime and of the original staff of forty-three, only three survived.

The photographic records  and archives of Tuol Sleng prison are the subject of Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia by Michelle Caswell for which she received the Waldo Gifford Leland Award from the Society of American Archivists.

Caswell, Michelle. Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.

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References:

Cambodia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Caswell, Michelle. Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014)

D’Amicantonio, J. (1997). The development of libraries in Cambodia: the post-Khmer Rouge years. World Libraries, 8(1), 36–41.

Dean, John F. 1990. “The Preservation of Books and Manuscripts in Cambodia.” American Archivist 53 (April): 282–97.

Jackson, Karl D. 1979. “Cambodia 1978: War, Pillage, and Purge in Democratic Kampuchea.” Asian Survey 19 (1): 72–84.