Hanoi's Hoa Lo prison achieved international infamy when captured American pilots sarcastically dubbed it the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War. Presidential candidate and veteran US Senator John McCain is perhaps the best known of the prison's alumni to international visitors. But for the Vietnamese, the horrors of the prison, known to them as Hoa Lo, date back many decades to the barbaric repression meted out to their nationalist leaders by the French colonial administration.
And John McCain is not the only political star to graduate from the Hanoi Hilton. Dozens of Vietnam's Communist luminaries predated McCain by decades including four former Communist Party Secretaries - Truong Chinh, Le Duan Nguyen Van Linh and Do Muoi. These men rose from their shackles to become the most powerful members of Vietnam's Communist leadership both during and after the American War.
Photo: Mark BowyerHanoi Hilton prisonThe French established the Maison Centrale in the late nineteenth century and its expansion and overcrowding coincided with the the rise of Vietnam's nationalist movement. The name Hoa Lo means furnace and referred originally to the sale of wood furnaces that took place on the street. The prison's reputation for hellish barbarity saw the street name take on a new significance.
Much of the prison complex was demolished to make way for an apartment and office tower in the early nineties. A small portion of the original building was preserved as a museum which, like its southern counterpart on Con Dao Island, tells stories of French brutality against Vietnamese nationalists as well as stories of nationalist heroism and escapes. A small section of the museum is dedicated to the US servicemen like McCain. The museum paints a picture of fraternity and care that is at odds with the accounts of brutality and torture that US detainees reported after the war.
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