Computer scientist who built a working replica of the wartime code-cracking Colossus machine which is on display at Bletchley Park
A computer scientist and historian who worked at the Science Museum in London and was a founding member of the Computer Conservation Society, Tony Sale was best known for his remarkable feat in building a replica of the wartime Colossus machine, Britain’s first real computer and the device that played a decisive role in code breaking at Bletchley Park.
The early code breaking that played such a part in winning many of the vital campaigns of the Second World War, ranging from the fight against Rommel in the Western Desert through the Battle of the Atlantic fought against the U-boats to the campaign in northwest Europe in 1944-45, had been done by hand at Bletchley. As the war progressed the mathematician and cryptanalyst Alan Turing became convinced that aspects of this process could be mechanised.
Through a number of evolutionary stages, beginning with a 24-valve machine christened Heath Robinson, the first computer-style machine called Colossus, which was largely the brainchild of the telecommunications engineer Tommy Flowers (obituary November 10, 1998), was built at Dollis Hill, Northwest London, in 1943, and transported to Bletchley. Although Flowers himself described it as a “string and sealing wax affair” the code-cracking Colossus could do in hours what had previously taken weeks. Although Colossus was not what today would be recognised as a computer, its development was a decisive step in the intelligence war, and it arrived just in time to tackle the flood of information interception and collating problems that were to be associated with the Normandy campaign. A 2,400-valve Colossus Mk II, replacing the original 1,500-valve Colossus, was ready in time for D-Day itself.
Eleven such machines were built, but at the end of the war all but two were destroyed on the orders of Churchill, as were all the plans for them. The survivors were removed to GCHQ at Cheltenham where they were thought to have remained in operation until 1958, eventually being dismantled some time between then and 1960. Extraordinary secrecy surrounded the details of Colossus long after they could have had any interest to modern computer scientists or to any potential enemy.
In 1991 Sale was working at the Science Museum in London, restoring some early British computers, when he became convinced that it would be possible to rebuild Colossus. He began the search for information on the machine which amounted only to eight wartime photographs that had been taken of the machine in addition to some fragments of circuit diagrams “which some engineers had kept illegally, as engineers always do”, as Sale later remarked.
Over the next 14 years Sale led a team that re-created the Colossus computer from scratch. At the same time he and colleagues also started a campaign to save Bletchley Park from demolition by property developers. As a result of this great effort, today the Colossus replica may be seen in all its antiquated splendour at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park.
Anthony Edgar Sale (Tony to friends and colleagues) was born in 1931 and educated at Dulwich College. At the age of 12 he demonstrated his engineering genius by building a robot which he called George out of Meccano. This prototype was to be substantially improved when in 1949 he joined the RAF as a radar specialist at RAF Debden in Essex, and embarked on a new George, using scrap metal from a crashed RAF Wellington bomber. Powered by a pair of motorcycle batteries inside his chest, this new George could walk, turn his head, move his arms and sit down. George attracted official attention and approval at Debden, and was put on display at open days at the RAF base.
After leaving the RAF Sale worked at Marconi Research Laboratories, and later for the Security Service (MI5) where he served for six years as a scientific officer, rising to become the intelligence agency’s principal scientific officer. In the meantime he had become a member of the British Computer Society of which he was subsequently to become its technical director, and in 1988 a Fellow.
For a number of years after leaving the Security Service he established and ran a computer software company before, in 1989, joining the Science Museum, where he became interested in the history of the British computer and as a curator managed the museum’s Computer Restoration Project. From this he came to believe that it would be possible to reconstruct the Colossus computer.
In 1989 he was one of a group that established the Computer Conservation Society. He was also involved in the campaign to save Bletchley Park from property development.
At Bletchley he founded the National Museum of Computing to preserve the nation’s ageing computers and it was there that the re-created wartime Colossus found a home and became the centrepiece on its completion in 2007. Visitors to the museum can also see Sale’s robot George among the other creations on display.
Last November Sale had reactivated the robot after decades of inactivity, replacing the original motorcycle batteries with lithium ones. As Sale said at the time: “I dug him out of the garage where he had been standing for 45 years, I had a fair bit of confidence he would work again and luckily I was right. I put some oil on the bearings and added a couple of new lithium batteries in his legs, switched him on and away he went. It was a lovely moment.”
In 1992 Sale had become secretary of the Bletchley Park Trust of which he was later a trustee. For his Colossus work he was awarded the Comdex IT Personality of the Year in 1997 and in 2000 received the Silver Medal of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts.
Sale is survived by his wife Margaret and by three children.
Tony Sale, computer historian and conservationist, was born on January 30, 1931. He died on August 28, 2011, aged 80
Lt-Col 'Joe’ Cêtre
Комроты, который во время битвы в Арденнах вёл роту в атаку по колено в снегу (прошу учесть поправку на аудиторию -- "снег по колено" тут явление достаточно редкое)
Special forces soldier who in 1980 led the daring SAS assault on the Iranian Embassy that freed hostages
The principal recollection of those watching events unfold at the Iranian Embassy on May 5, 1980, was of the hooded figure on the balcony in Princes Gate, just seconds before the first explosion. That figure was Sergeant John McAleese — John Mac to his comrades— whose task it was to blast the first point of entry for the 22 SAS team dedicated to the rescue of the hostages. The SAS had advance notice of their likely commitment thanks to one of their former members on the staff of Scotland Yard having telephoned Hereford. This gave it time to form a coherent plan.
Although the final rescue was accomplished with breathtaking speed in seven minutes, the five-day long build up had been agonisingly slow. The terrorists’ aim was to give maximum publicity to their minority cause within Iran, which it has to be acknowledged they assembled the means to achieve. By chance, five journalists were in the embassy when the terrorists seized control; after five days, there were more than 200 at the scene with television cameras poised to cover the rescue. The irony was that the worldwide publicity of the almost entirely successful rescue and of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had authorised the SAS operation, totally obscured the terrorists’ cause.
The task facing the SAS rescue group, operating under the control of the commanding officer 22nd SAS Lieutenant-Colonel (later General Sir) Michael Rose, was to effect the safe release of 20 civilian hostages at minimum risk of the six terrorist gunmen from killing any of them. (One hostage had already been murdered and his body pushed out onto the street as a demonstration of the terrorists’ resolve). The hostages were in two groups on the embassy’s second floor, each group guarded by a gunman, with four more situated at tactical points in the building.
The first entry achieved by McAleese had the required effect of creating shock and surprise — the terrorist leader was talking to the police on the telephone at the time — and thereafter events moved swiftly. The main assault was made into a room that was unexpectedly empty and possibly due to the consequent brief delay this gave time for one hostage to be shot. The remaining 19 were rescued and five of the six gunman shot dead.
The SAS operation, codenamed “Nimrod” was specifically authorised by the Prime Minister and the responsibility for the use of military force was passed from the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to the CO of 22nd SAS. For the first time an SAS operations was shown live, with ITV and the BBC interrupting their schedules to broadcast the raid.
In the perception of the British public, the regiment had taken on an almost mystical nature, rather like MI5 and MI6. It has been reported that, on taking office as Prime Minister, Tony Blair believed the organisation to be around 40,000 strong — the actual figure was close to 1,200, including the two Territorial Army regiments of 21st and 23rd SAS.
The part in the rescue played by McAleese, beyond the firing of the entry charge, received no publicity at the time or has since. Originally from Laurieston, Stirlingshire, he served 16 years years in the SAS and received the Military Medal for gallantry in Northern Ireland in 1988. Subsequently, he served as a bodyguard to three successive British Prime Ministers.
Having left the service, he first ran a pub in Hereford and then went into the security business. He also helped present a BBC programme alongside Dermot O’Leary called SAS: Are You Tough Enough?. Once, when speaking in a documentary programme, he relived the moment he began the embassy rescue operation by saying, “They were on our home soil, like invaders. We knew what our mission was — it was to release the hostages. My only job at this point is to get on to the balcony, place the charge, stand back, blow it, turn around and go back in through the window.”
In 2009 Paul, the elder child from McAleese’s first marriage, joined 2nd Battalion The Rifles with the ambition of moving into the special forces. Having become a sergeant and a trained sniper who had served in Iraq, he was killed on August 20, 2009 in an explosion in Helmand province, Afghanistan. A fellow soldier had been hit by a roadside bomb and Paul McAleese was hit by a second blast as he tried to reach him.
McAleese campaigned tirelessly for better government and public support for British troops in Afghanistan, particularly after his son died. “Top brass have repeatedly told Gordon Brown what they need, but he will not listen,” he said. “The military must be allowed to get on with the job. If not, Brown should sack himself now.”
Grief-stricken by his son’s death, it is thought by his friends that this began the decline in his health that led to his death, seemingly from a heart attack in his sleep, while working for a security company in Thessalonika, Greece.
His marriage to his first wife Kim was dissolved. He is survived by his second wife, a daughter from his first marriage and a son and daughter from his second.
Sergeant John McAleese, MM, soldier of special forces, died on August 26, 2011. He was in his early sixties.
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
Rear-Admiral 'Chico' Roberts
Fleet Air Arm pilot who survived a torpedo attack in the Second World War and three forced landings in Korea
Военно-морской пилот, который пережил торпедную атаку во Второй мировой войне и три вынужденные посадки в Корее
Major Bruce Kinloch
Soldier who was abandoned by his comrades in Burma and later became a game warden in Africa
Офицер, которого бросили его товарищи в Бирме, и который затем стал лесничим в Африке
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Twiss
Pilot who was decorated in war and then became the first man to break the 1,000mph barrier
Пилот, награждённый за храбрость во время войны, который стал первым человеком, преодолевшим барьер скорости 1000 миль в час
Lieutenant-Colonel 'Pug' Davis
Founding father of the Special Boat Service who was decorated for a daring wartime rescue
Основатель Специальной Лодочной Службы, который был награжден за отвагу во время спасательной операции
>Lieutenant-Commander Peter Twiss
> Pilot who was decorated in war and then became the first man to break the 1,000mph barrier
>Пилот, награждённый за храбрость во время войны, который стал первым человеком, преодолевшим барьер скорости 1000 миль в час
Naval fighter pilot whose postwar exploits included setting a world air speed record of 1,132mph in 1956
After a distinguished wartime career as a naval fighter pilot, Peter Twiss joined Fairey Aviation as a test pilot after the war, and came dramatically to the world’s notice when in March 1956 he established a world air speed record of 1,132mph in the Fairey Delta 2.
This raised the world record to above the 1,000mph mark for the first time, in the process shattering by more than 300mph the previous record, 822mph, which had been set by an American F100C Supersabre, piloted by a USAF colonel, in October 1955.
With its delta-wing planform, elegant lines, and “droop snoot” needle nose, the FD2 represented a triumph for British aviation, seeming to place the British aircraft unassailably ahead of its competitors, and ushering in the era of Mach 2 flight.
It made Twiss, who had won the Distinguished Service Cross twice, for his record as a convoy escort pilot and in support of the Operation Torch landings in North Africa in 1942, a hero and household name in Britain overnight. Yet, as Twiss was later to recall in his book Faster than the Sun, published in 1963, one of the greatest challenges to getting the record accepted was the difficulty in obtaining the decisive evidence for it with the photographic methods then available.
It was a triumph for Fairey Aviation, whose most famous plane before 1956 had been the “Stringbag” Swordfish, that biplane veteran of Second World War convoy escorts whose air speed was barely a tenth of that of the FD2.
Lionel Peter Twiss was born in 1921, and was educated at Sherborne School. He had at his first attempt been rejected by the Fleet Air Arm, which he wanted to join as a pilot.
It was a different story when war broke out. He was accepted as a Naval Airman Second Class in 1939 and after training at 14 Elementary and Reserve Flying Training School at Castle Bromwich and Yeovilton, he was posted to the unglamorous work of target towing in Orkney.
He was next posted to the Merchant Ship Fighter Unit, piloting Hawker Hurricane fighters on a “one way” launch from catapult merchant ships (known as CAM ships), an early form of convoy air defence in that era when aircraft carriers were still scarce.
The idea was that the Hurricane was catapulted from the ship into the air with rocket assistance, to engage any enemy aircraft menacing the convoy. Having done so, the pilot then had to ditch or bale out and hope to be picked up by a passing ship. It was not an inviting prospect for the pilot, offering limited odds for survival. Twiss survived the experience, and was drafted in 1942 to 807 Squadron, flying Fairey Fulmar fighters from the carrier Argus in the Mediterranean on Malta convoys and on night intruder operations. For this work he was awarded the DSC in June 1942. No 802 subsequently converted to Supermarine Seafires (the naval version of the Spitfire) in which Twiss flew air cover from HMS Furious in support of the Anglo-American Torch landings in North Africa in November 1942.
For his role in support of the Allied landings in Algeria and Morocco he was awarded a Bar to his DSC which was gazetted in March 1943.
After serving with a night fighter interceptor unit in the United Kingdom he was detached to the British Air Commission in Washington, as Night Fighter Representative, 1943-44. During his stay he travelled all over the United States, flying various operational and prototype American fighter aircraft, and investigated nightfighter radar equipment. He also served for a time at the US Naval Test Centre at Patuxent River, Maryland.
He returned to the United Kingdom in early 1944 and took part in several intruder raids on Germany from Ford Naval Air Station, helping to develop night fighter tactics with the RAF’s Fighter Interception Unit.
In September 1944 he returned to Patuxent for a few months and finally came back to England in 1945 to join No 3 Empire Test Pilots School. From there he was sent to the Naval Squadron at the Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment at Boscombe Down, Wiltshire. He ended the war with the rank of lieutenantcommander.
He joined the Fairey Aviation Company as a test pilot in 1946 and was engaged in flight testing the Firefly fighter, Gannet airborne early warning aircraft and experimental Fairey Delta 1. He won the High Speed Handicap race in the International Air Races at Lympne, Kent, in 1947, flying a Fairey Firefly IV at a speed of 305.93 mph.
He also piloted the Fairey Rotodyne vertical takeoff transport convertiplane, which in 1959 established a world record for rotorcraft with a speed of 190.9 mph over a 100km circuit.
On October 6, 1954, he piloted the Fairey Delta 2 high speed delta-wing research aircraft on its maiden flight. In February 1955 he was awarded a Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air when, by a brilliant feat of pilotage he safely landed the FD2 after a fuel system failure. He had taken part in the deck landing trials of all Fairey aircraft since 1949.
Then, on March 10, 1957, came his historic challenge in the skies over Chichester to the existing world air speed record held by America. Flying at 38,000 feet he achieved a mean Mach number of 1.731 for the two runs on which his attempt was measured.
The Queen, the Prime Minister and Colonel Hanes, from whom he had wrested the air speed record, were among those who offered Twiss congratulations. He was appointed OBE the following year. He had flown more than 140 different types and had probably piloted more high performance aircraft than any other Englishman.
Twiss was Chief Test Pilot of Fairey Aviation from 1957 to 1960. For the film Sink the Bismarck! (1960) he flew a Fairey Swordfish.
When, in 1960, Fairey Aviation was sold to the helicopter manufacturer Westland, Twiss joined Fairey Marine where he was responsible for the development and sales of day cruisers.
He appeared in the James Bond film From Russia With Love (1963) driving one of the company’s speedboats. In 1969 he also took part in the Round Britain Powerboat Race driving a Fairey Huntsman 707 Fordsport. Twiss was a director of Fairey Marine, 1968-78, and he was a member of Lasham Gliding Club.
Twiss was five times married: to Constance Tomkinson, 1944; Vera Maguire, 1950; Cherry Huggins, 1960; Heather Danby, 1964; and Jane Mary de Lucey, 2002. He had a son who predeceased him, three daughters, one of whom predeceased him, and several stepchildren.
Peter Twiss, OBE, DSC and Bar, test pilot , was born on July 23, 1921. He died on August 31, 2011, aged 90
>Group Captain Billy Drake
>Один из самых результативных британских асов Второй мировой войны, >сбивший 25 самолетов противника (а также прямой потомок того самого >Дрейка)
Much decorated RAF fighter pilot credited with 18 combat victories who also destroyed many enemy aircraft on the ground
In a remarkable career on the front line that lasted effectively from the first days of the Second World War, when he was posted to France with No 1 (Hurricane) Squadron, to the summer of 1944, Billy Drake not only became an “ace” (five kills) more than three times over, but was also an expert in ground attack. As such he destroyed numerous enemy aircraft on the ground during his period in command of a Kittyhawk fighter bomber squadron in the Western Desert, and later commanded a Typhoon wing that bombed German V1 sites in France.
In what was an extraordinarily long career in combat by the standards of Second World War fighter operations, he was officially accredited with 18 combat victories, though the total may well be much nearer the 24½ destroyed and nine probables claimed by himself. Drake also destroyed 13 aircraft on the ground and damaged several more. He ended the war with the DSO and two DFCs and had also been decorated with the US Distinguished Flying Cross.
Continuing his RAF career after the war, he entered the jet age, flying the first-generation fighters Gloster Meteors and De Havilland Vampires in the late 1940s and graduating to the Hawker Hunter as the RAF entered the supersonic age.
Born in London in 1917, he was educated at various schools there and in Switzerland where he gained his lifelong love of skiing. He joined the RAF in 1936, and after basic flying training was commissioned and posted to 1 Squadron, the RAF’s oldest, then flying the Hawker Fury biplane. In early 1939 it was re-equipped with the Hawker Hurricane with which, in September that year, he was sent to France as part of the Advanced Air Striking Force (AASF), flying from Berry-au-Bac, within flying range of German airfields.
On October 29, 1939, the squadron claimed the RAF’s first combat victory over the Western Front when one of its pilots shot down a Dornier Do17 bomber. This was one of the few incidents during the “Phoney War” that was then to ensue, with little other air activity on the Western Front save for leaflet drops over Germany carried out by the AASF’s bombers. That was to change with the Blitzkrieg of May 1940, but in fact Drake had opened his account before then, scoring his first combat victory on April 20, when his squadron was attacked by Messerschmitt 109s over Thionville. He shot down one Messerschmitt and claimed another that day as 1 Squadron repelled the Luftwaffe’s fighters.
With the opening of the Blitkrieg on May 10 the tempo was to change dramatically, the squadron flying a hectic programme of sorties as the Wehrmacht swept forward into the Netherlands, Belgium and France supported by its powerful tactical air forces. In nine days from the opening of the campaign, No 1 submitted 114 claims for combat victories with Drake shooting down two bombers, a Heinkel He111 and a Do17 on May 10 and May 13, with a second Dornier unconfirmed, though it was almost certainly destroyed.
As he attacked the second bomber, which he saw catch fire, he was himself assailed from astern by a Messerschmitt 110 whose cannon shells set his aircraft on fire. He baled out, badly wounded from shell splinters in the back, which required an operation to remove them. He was invalided home to the UK where, after he recovered, he was posted as an instructor, thereby missing the combat opportunities of the Battle of Britain.
When he recovered he was briefly posted to 213 (Hurricane) Squadron, but almost immediately volunteered for the new 421 Flight, a Spitfire unit that was being formed for low-level fighter reconnaissance over the Channel. This provided ample opportunities for air combat and Drake was credited with four more victories between November 1940 and January 1941, and was awarded his first DFC.
After a period with an operational training unit, he was posted in November to Sierra Leone to 128 Squadron, a Coastal Command unit whose role was to defend against the intrusions of Vichy French aircraft. As it was, Drake was to score one of the unit’s rare victories, when on December 13, 1941, he shot down one of the Vichy’s Martin M167F bombers over Freetown.
In April 1942, thirsting for more concentrated action, he was posted to command 112 “Shark” Squadron, whose Kittyhawks flew bomber escorts, fighter bomber and ground strafing operations over the Western Desert. Both his leadership and his performance as a fighter and groundattack pilot made this a highly successful period for the Sharks as they operated over the fluctuating fortunes of the Eighth Army between June and December 1942. During the retreat to Alamein, Drake was in almost constant action, and was awarded an immediate Bar to his DFC, followed not long afterwards by a DSO. On December 11, after claiming two fighters, shot down, one German and one Italian, his Kittyhawk was hit but he managed to bring it into a controlled crash landing.
At the end of the year he was rested from operations, promoted to wing commander and given a staff post with HQ Middle East. This was not much to his taste and he was glad in June 1943 to be posted to Malta commanding a Spitfire wing and escorting US Army Air Force bombers in attacks on airfields in Sicily. His last official victim was a Macchi 202 fighter of the Regia Aeronautica, shot down over Gerbini, west of Catania, on July 7, 1943, shortly before the Anglo-American invasion of the island. His services to the USAAF earned him the US Distinguished Flying Cross from the Americans.
Returning to the UK at the end of the year, Drake was given command of 20 Wing in the 2nd Tactical Air Force, which in the first half of 1944 was carrying out softening-up and disruption operations on military targets in France in the run-up to D-Day. His wing’s Typhoons were involved among other operations in attacking concealed V1 sites in the Pas de Calais.
With his vast experience of fighter and ground-attack operations he was a natural candidate as chief flying instructor at the RAF Fighter Leaders’ School, where he nevertheless wangled himself on to the odd operation against targets in occupied France. In August 1944 this “unofficial” operational career finally ended when he was sent to the US Staff School at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, as a prelude to his returning to the UK to join the operations staff at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), where he spent the remainder of the war.
Granted a permanent commission at the end of the war, he served in Japan, Malaya and Singapore, before returning to the UK as an instructor on rocket-firing from Vampires as the RAF embraced the jet age. A posting as air attaché in Switzerland was not uncongenial to him on account of his love of skiing, and his final appointment was command of the ground-attack base RAF Chivenor in north Devon.
He retired from the RAF in 1963 and went to Portugal where he established and ran a bar and restaurant in the Algarve, eventually returning to the UK in 1993.
Twice married, and twice divorced, he is survived by the two sons of his first marriage.
Group Captain Billy Drake, DSO, DFC and Bar, US DFC, fighter pilot, was born on December 20, 1917. He died on August 28, 2011, aged 93
Камбоджийский художник, который избежал смерти, потому что красные кхмеры поручили ему написание портретов Пол Пота
Cambodian artist who escaped death because the Khmer Rouge set him to painting portraits of Pol Pot
The Cambodian painter Vann Nath was one of a handful of prisoners who survived incarceration in Pol Pot’s secret prison code-named S-21. There, between 1975 and 1979, more than 14,000 people were interrogated, tortured and put to death as “enemies of the state”.
Vann Nath’s eloquent memoir, A Cambodian Prison Portrait, was published in 1998. He was a tireless supporter of the UN-sponsored tribunal prosecuting surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge movement and an inspiring, thoughtful witness to a dark period of Cambodian history.
Vann Nath was born in 1946 into a farming family in northwestern Cambodia. Educated through primary school, he spent several years as a Buddhist monk before attending art school in the provincial city of Battambang. As a young man he made a living by painting portraits, landscapes and advertising posters for films.
The Communist Party of Kampuchea, known in the West as the Khmer Rouge, seized power in April 1975 after a five-year civil war. Inspired by Maoist China, the party’s leaders presided over a peasant-based revolution. To achieve their quixotic ideas of a level society and to expand the labour force, they drove the country’s two million urban dwellers, including Vann Nath, into the countryside to take up agricultural work. The new regime also abandoned formal education and abolished money, markets and private property.
Over the next two years hundreds of thousands of people died of overwork, malnutrition and summary executions. Instead of blaming their Utopian policies, Cambodia’s leaders came to believe that the revolution was being sabotaged by internal enemies. Tens of thousands of suspects, including senior Communist cadres and innocent bystanders, were herded into S-21 and other provincial prisons, where almost all the inmates were put to death.
Vann Nath was arrested and taken to S-21 in January 1978, just as war broke out between Cambodia and Vietnam. He had no idea why he was there. After a month shackled to fellow inmates he was unexpectedly taken to see Duch, the director of S-21, who knew that Nath had been a painter. He showed him a photograph of Pol Pot, whom Nath failed to recognise, and told him to make a “realistic, clear, correct and noble reproduction of this photograph”.
Nath’s first painting was nine feet high and three feet wide. For the next 11 months, unshackled and well fed, he worked with three other artist-prisoners painting portraits of “Brother Number One”, as Pol Pot was known to his close associates. The prisoners worked from photographs, and Nath wrote later that Pol Pot’s “face looked smooth and calm, but I knew he must be savage and very evil”. In five months Nath completed eight large, flattering portraits. He never knew where they were sent.
Throughout 1978 fighting with Vietnam intensified, and in December Vietnam mounted a full-scale military offensive. Cambodia cracked open like an egg. Phnom Penh fell on January 7, 1979, soon after Nath and other S-21 personnel had left the city. In the ensuing confusion Nath managed to escape and after a time he volunteered for the newly formed, Vietnamese-dominated Cambodian army. In mid-1979 he travelled to Battambang and was reunited with his wife, who told him that their two young sons had died of illness while he was gone.
In the following year those in power in Cambodia decided to turn S-21 into a museum of genocidal crimes. Nath was recruited to paint scenes of life inside the prison. The museum opened in 1981, and Nath’s disturbing paintings still hang on its walls.
In the 1990s Vann Nath owned a small restaurant in Phnom Penh. He often made himself available to scholars, journalists and human rights activists, taking pains to describe in detail what had happened to him at the prison and telling them that he longed for a trial of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge.
Impressed by Nath’s integrity and thoughtfulness, the Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh recruited him in 2002 to play himself in a documentary about S-21, alongside another survivor and 12 former workers at the prison. In the grounds of the museum, these men recalled and re-enacted their time at S-21 in a chilling, largely improvised script. Nath was the conscience of the film, comforting his fellow survivor and coaxing horrifying memories from his former captors. His acting made the film, while harsh, intensely moving.
In 2009 Duch was the first Khmer Rouge figure to be tried by the UN-sponsored tribunal in Phnom Penh. For several days of eloquent testimony, Nath confronted his former captorpatron for the first time in 30 years.
This year, honouring their work together, Nath and Rithy Panh received doctorates at the University of Paris.
By then Nath’s health had deteriorated, and after several bouts of kidney failure he suffered a stroke last month and went into a coma. He is survived by his wife and by their son and two daughters.
Vann Nath, artist and survivor of the S-21 prison camp, was born in 1946. He died on September 5, 2011, aged 65
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'