Vann Nath clearly remembers the day in April 1977 when he was arrested by the Khmer Rouge. He was tied and shoved into an ox cart with no chance to say goodbye to his wife and two children, though that was not the worst of it.
A week later, he found himself shackled to the floor alongside dozens of other prisoners in S21 - now known as Tuol Sleng - the largest of the Khmer Rouge detention centres where an estimated 17,000 men, women and children were executed between 1975 and 1979.
The tale of his survival has the makings of a gruesome movie. But as one of only four identified survivors of S21, Vann Nath's story and the tales of other victims will soon be told for the first time in a real court when the Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunal begins its first trial next Tuesday.
Former S21 prison commander Kaing Guek Eav, the one-time maths teacher known as Comrade Duch, is the first defendant to come before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC).
Duch (pronounced Doik), who is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, has co-operated with the court in helping determine what happened during the four-year reign of terror by the Khmer Rouge, the ultra-Maoist revolutionaries who sought to remake Cambodia into an agrarian, communal society. Some 1.7 million Cambodians died of torture, execution, starvation and disease during this period. Duch, 66, has already been in jail for a decade and faces life in prison.
Vann Nath - who expects to be a witness at the trial - never saw his children again. They died of starvation while he was in S21. 'One was five years old. The other, five to six months,' he said.
He is eager for the trials to start, although it has been 30 years since he fled Tuol Sleng on the day the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge. There had been so many delays in the trials and never any apologies, he said. 'I was angry. But my angry period has passed. This is the period for finding solutions,' he said.