The Nine guide is getting out of a full bus. Today he has twenty Vietnamese tourists who arrived at Phu Quoc for only a few days. The largest Vietnamese island is known for long sandy beaches, newly built resorts, black pepper, fish sauce or marine fruits, but especially high coconut palms.
It was they who gave the nickname and prison, which will be accompanied by Nine tourists. The locals call her “prison under coconut”. However, those who were imprisoned here during the Vietnam war know it under a different name. For them it is Hell on earth – Hell on the ground.
An older man is slowly coming out of the bus. His wife supports him and headed for a memorial in front of a prison that reminds of the atrocities of the Vietnamese War. While others pull out the phones, they take the fragrant sticks from the pile behind a huge stone. It is engraved in great golden script that heroic martyrs are honored and the homeland appreciates their merits.
The husbands will bow their heads, hold the sticks in front of the face and pray. After a while they stick them into a container with sand in front of the memorial. They seem to know this place well. They pull the Vietnamese dongs out of their wallets and throw the coins in two sheet metal containers to keep the memory of the former prison.
“The gentleman had friends who found death here. He didn’t know what was happening in this place, as they died in cages in the hot sun. They disappeared, and he didn’t see them anymore. None of us knew what was happening here,” explains Nine, who is waiting for two -hour accompanying tourists on wavy sheet barracks. These are marked with numbers and resemble cattle stables.
And that is exactly what the guards treated the prisoners. Or worse. They tortured, muted and murdered them. At the same time, the International Red Cross Committee and other organizations have long pointed out human rights violations. However, the prison used these practices until the end of the Vietnamese war. It was closed only in 1975 after the unification of Vietnam.
Oscalplas from the skin alive
Today, the former prison area looks like an ordinary museum. It stands by the road, lined with colored flags, benches and trees. In front of a white building with a tile roof on which the Vietnamese flag rises, they are neatly cut into different geometric shapes. It looks almost idyllic. The outside does not indicate what horrors were going on here.
Under the shelter is hidden stone memorial and above it a large inscription: “We will forever be grateful to the fallen hero”. Just before him, many visitors will bow. There are voices from the building and the first steps of tourists lead directly there. In the middle of the room there is a large rusty grate with three rows of round holes with a sharp edge.
Visitors look at it confused. At first glance, it is not clear what he served for. “The prisoner forced to undress the donation and repeatedly roll his head forward on the iron grid.
There are photos of people who died here on the walls. Some have legs disfigured by wounds deep to the bone so that they cannot escape. From the skulls, dug under the ground, long nails stick out on black and white images. This is how many prisoners, dissidents or those whom the regime thought did not agree with the direction of the then South Vietnam ended.
The testimonies of those who have survived, along with authentic shots of the prison, are projected on the screen in the next room. At this point, women or older people, who were tortured as well as prisoners of war, were to die.
They crouched in cages like animals
On the watchtower, where he once stood a soldier with a weapon, there is only a poppy. However, the barbed mesh stretched on concrete and bamboo bars is the same as it was years ago. You go to prison – desolate, arid, without greenery, trees and shadow. Everything was cut, only the dusty ground and the burning sun remained.
Although July, the rainy season, the temperatures exceed thirty. Many tourists hold parasols over their heads, coat with another layer of sunscreen, or the faces cool down with hand -held electric fans. However, the prisoners did not protect anything from the heat.
In the cages that the locals call tiger, but rather remind the pebble pebbles, dummies are crouched. Thus, the prisoners chopped in them, while the sun roasting during the day. They had nowhere to hide, they couldn’t even shoot their legs. The cage could barely sit down. In every careless movement, the skin was crushed by the barbed wire.
Moreover, the cage guards found a fire during the day to make them even hotter and watering the prisoners with salt water. When the night came, the temperature dropped significantly, so they shaking from the winter. If the supervisors did not seem cruel enough, prisoners pushed the prisoners into the iron container next to the cages and let them die gradually from hunger and thirst.
Ghosts of dead martyrs
“You know, we believe there are the souls of the dead, so we will silence the voice, calm down. We think we hear the sounds of death outside,” says Nine’s tourist guide slowly, looking over the shoulder as if he would expect to see the spirit there. Nevertheless, he claims that as many people as possible should come here to see what atrocities were happening years ago and paid respect to those who died here.
“This historical place is very important for our country. In the past, during the war, many communists have died here. We come here, we honor the past, we honor our ancestors, and we honor people in the country,” Nine tells me in front of the stone memorial.
It is not the first to remember ghosts. Already a taxi driver who brought me to the prison in the morning wanted to discourage me from a visit. “Think of it, your souls can catch you. There are more beautiful places, don’t go there,” he urged with broken English.
He claimed that tourists go to the prison in bulk, but the locals avoid her arches. Several times, he even changed the route and the Grab application, through which taxis is ordered in Vietnam, has always shown a longer time of arrival at the finish.
“It’s not a good place. There was a lot of blood. Why do you want to see it? It’s over to us. Phu Quoc has beautiful places,” he insisted on his driver who lived on the island all his life and never left it.
Finally, we came in front of the prison with a twenty -minute delay, just when a group of Korean tourists was based. There were several children among them. The taxi driver just shook his head and gave me a cell phone where he wrote through the translator that “souls have already caught some of the children and they will have very bad dreams”.
When I went for barbed wires, the taxi driver was still there. He waited for him to think about it. Instead of a prison, he offered me a visit to jewelry and farm shops full of pearls. I doubted whether it was really superstitious or just wanted to earn.
This is what is the frequent trick of Vietnamese taxi drivers who try to get tourists to souvenir and jewelry stores. When they buy something and spend Dongy, the taxi driver gets a commission from the store for bringing new customers.
Nails stuck in the skull
The prison in the south of the island was created in French colonial times. It was opened in 1949, especially those who wanted the independence of Vietnam. However, the new and significantly brutal history of the prison began to be written only after the outbreak of the Vietnamese War, in which the Communist North Vietnam, supported by the Soviet Union and China, and South Vietnam, based on the United States and their Western Allies, fought.
In the Pho Quoc prison, which belonged to South Vietnam, at that time up to 40,000 prisoners of war ended. “They were from Vietcong or those who were in favor of communism,” he whispered to me in front of one of the sheets of Beijing, who teaches history at college. It was in this period of the Vietnam War that people began to call a coconut prison.
“During more than five years from July 1967 to March 1973, more than four thousand prisoners were killed. Evidence includes mass graves with the remains of thousands of people and nails eight to ten centimeters long found in skulls, tibia bones, knees and other parts of the bodies,” writes one of many silver fans.
Not only men, but also women in all ages, died there. The sheet metal stables turned into hell on hot days, in which the prisoners lay and malnourished. The dummies with sticking ribs and indicated bloody wounds show in almost every barrack how their guards tortured and abused them.
With the broken hands, tied to the wooden bench, they received wounds with a whip, or they were beaten between the plates with a hammer. Electroshocks, burning, tearing teeth, nails, casting liters of water into the throat and melting were daily. Supervisors used more than forty different forms of torture. The aim was to force the convicts to reveal any information and no longer have a chance to escape.
Slovaks get into the prison easier
Tens of thousands of people visit the Phu Quoc prison every year. Many of them are former prisoners. “During the war, this prison was a school for patriots where they strengthened the character and combat spirit. Today it is a place where young generations recognize the bravery and victims of their predecessors,” says the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture, Sport and Tourism.
Frequent visitors to the prison are also Slovaks, as it is possible to fly directly from Bratislava. Some time ago, she was also visited by the Biznárovci. After traveling several parts of Vietnam, they spent several days on the island of Phu Quoc. They did not miss a prison tour, which is an important part of the history of the country and is also one of the sought -after tourist attractions.
“We are interested in history and when we found out that there is a unique place on the island, we immediately set out,” says Michal and Natasa Biznárovci, who visited the Museum of Military Technology and Remnants from the Vietnamese War in Hočimin’s city a few days before. There is an exhibition dedicated to chemical weapons used in the Vietnamese War. Some families still suffer from their consequences today.
“There are a number of museums in Vietnam that show history, culture or war periods they have gone through,” they say. They were surprised that there were almost the only tourists in the coconut prison, although the museum was completely free. The view of the cages where the prisoners were closed shocked them. Therefore, they do not recommend visiting children and people with a weaker stomach.
“The metal barracks reminded us of concentration camps in Europe. At the same time, we felt that some depictions of torture were drawn by hair. As if the museum wanted to show the brutality of the opponents. On the other hand, when we visited the prison of the North Hovietnam Army Hoa Lo in Hanoi, they showed there.”
Light at the end of a dusty tunnel
According to the statistics provided by the prison administrator, between July 1967 and April 1972, 41 escapes took place in the Phu Quoc prison. “Three hundred prisoners managed to escape,” says Nine guide. The first tunnel was dug by prisoners in the cell number thirteen at the end of 1969 and 21 January 1970 Pest fled up to 21 prisoners.
After further attempts to escape the prison, the dusty land was poured out by cement. Today, the prison visitors can cross the route that the prisoners have run away. After a few steps, they get to the tunnel, where they will see a dummy of a wounded Vietnamese as it crawls. Tourists hold phones in their hands and shoot everything. One visitor came sick during the tunnel tour and had to sit on the ground.
“That’s the incredible heat,” he says in English to her husband, who gives her water. Although the metal shears are open from both sides, it is very warm, the air stands in them and high humidity causes the tourist to come sick. At least he can imagine how prisoners had to feel.
The prison tour takes about two hours. It culminates in an excursion in tunnels. After that, we return to the world of beaches with white sand and newly built hotels with tourists from all over the world. Nine will come back here again with a new group of tourists.
An older gentleman with his wife and fabric handkerchief also wipes tears. “Every time we leave the prison, it is suddenly silent. People are thinking about it and cannot understand that they were doing this to the prisoners of their own,” he tells me a farewell to the stairs of the Nine bus and the door will close behind him.
