Coconut Tree Prison on Phu Quoc island – Hell on Earth!

We are all well aware of atrocities of the Vietnam War – there is no doubt about it. This war was hell taking place in the terrain of today’s Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. During the very same war called by the Vietnamese ‘’the American war’’ there was a prison which functioned in Phu Quoc Island until 1973, the jail where the Americans were sending tens of thousands of captives – it was the cruelest prison of the Vietnam war. It was at that time the prisoners were burned alive, had their teeth knocked out, had nails hammered in different parts of their bodies, had their genitals crushed… This post is about the true Hell on Earth …

‘’Coconut Tree Prison’’ was built by the French in 1949 and it was expanded by the Americans during the Vietnam War. Many uncomfortable political prisoners were imprisoned there. Its name comes from the village where it was constructed: Coconut Tree Village. It is estimated that in this prison in total there were detained 40,000 Vietnamese prisoners and political enemies opposing the French and the US. The inmates sent there by the Americans during the war were subject to unimaginably cruel tortures. Apparently, in the period of 6-7 years there were registered 4,000 deaths and mutilations leading to disability of  tens of thousands of prisoners! That’s not all, on the spot you can see with your own eyes types of tortures and mutilation carried out on prisoners at that time, which is illustrated dramatically by very realistically created models of people tortured there …! You will also discern blood and emotions on the models’ faces. You can visit many barracks there:

Below you can see an inmate model having his genitals being burnt.

The boy in the below photo had a nail hammered to his skull:

A visit to this place can really touch your heart. First, your attention is drawn to so called tiger cages made of barbed wire. Prisoners were closed there in a huddled postion and exposed to the sun or enduring any other weather for a few days, not being allowed even to use the toilet so they had to pee on the spot.

Next thing you’ll see is a container in which inmates were closed also for a few days and were left there without light, sufficient accesses to air and having no other option than to pee on the spot.

The worst possible types of torture executed in the prison were: cooking alive in the boiler, knocking  teeth out with a hammer, burning eyes using light bulbs, crushing or burning genitals, hammering the body using nails (e.g. knee, head), electrocution .. The created models depicting tortured inmates reflect this horror in a scary way, but at least it makes the recipient aware of the scale of atrocities taking place there:

A barrack with a kitchen was a popular place from which many prison breaks were planned and carried out – it seems a few prisoners managed to escape from this hell. They dug a long tunnel in the ground passing other barracks until the woods outside the fence of the prison area:

These are the tools that were used during a prison break:

It happened that during strikes (when it got to the point that a hunger strike did not have any influence on the management of the prison) some prisoners disembowelled themselves leading to a situation that the management finally met their demands.

There is no admission fee to the prison.

Visiting this place gives rise to the question of how any man could treat any other human with such a cruelty? Frankly, in our opinion death in gas chambers of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was a ‘piece of cake’ compared with what happened here in the current paradise island of Phu Quoc …: /