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The Gate, by Francois Bizot
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In 1971 a young French ethnologist named Francois Bizot was taken prisoner by forces of the Khmer Rouge who kept him chained in a jungle camp for months before releasing him. Four years later Bizot became the intermediary between the now victorious Khmer Rouge and the occupants of the besieged French embassy in Phnom Penh, eventually leading a desperate convoy of foreigners to safety across the Thai border.
Out of those ordeals comes this transfixing book. At its center lies the relationship between Bizot and his principal captor, a man named Douch, who is today known as the most notorious of the Khmer Rouge’s torturers but who, for a while, was Bizot’s protector and friend. Written with the immediacy of a great novel, unsparing in its understanding of evil, The Gate manages to be at once wrenching and redemptive.
- Sales Rank: #696114 in Books
- Published on: 2004-01-06
- Released on: 2004-01-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .65" w x 5.24" l, .49 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
Amazon.com Review
French ethnologist Francois Bizot's The Gate offers a unique insight into the rise of the Khmer Rouge. In 1971 Bizot was studying ancient Buddhist traditions and living with his Khmer partner and daughter in a small village in the environs of the Angkor temple complex. The Khmer Rouge was fighting a guerilla war in rural Cambodia; during a routine visit to a nearby temple, Bizot and his two Khmer colleagues were captured by them and imprisoned deep in the jungle on suspicion of working for the CIA. On trial for his life, over the next three months Bizot developed a strong relationship with his captor, Comrade Douch, who would later become the Khmer Rouge's chief interrogator and commandant of the horrifying Tuol Sleng prison where thousands of captives were tortured prior to execution. The portrait Bizot gives of the young schoolteacher-turned revolutionary and their interaction is simultaneously fascinating and terrifying.
Finally freed after Douch had pleaded his case with the leadership, Bizot became the only Western captive of the Khmer Rouge ever to be released alive, but his story does not end there. On his return to Phnom Penh, due to his fluency in Khmer, he was appointed interpreter between the occupying forces and the remaining western nationals holed up in the French embassy. As the interlocutor at the eponymous gate, he relates with dreadful resignation the moment when the Khmer nationals in the compound were ordered out by the Khmer Rouge forces for "resettlement."
Bizot's is a touching and gripping account of one of the darkest moments in modern history and it is told with a unique voice. As a Cambodian resident, a lover of Cambodia and a fluent Khmer speaker, Bizot shows an understanding of the prevailing mood in the country that other Western commentators have failed to capture effectively, while as a Western academic he is able to see the forces at work and how Cambodia fits into the bigger picture of South East Asian conflict. What emerges is a tale of a land plunged into insanity and Bizot tells it like a eulogy for a dead friend and a confrontation of old demons. The Gate is a stunning book and a must for anyone interested in this grim period of Asian history. --Duncan Thomson
From Publishers Weekly
"It's better to have a sparsely populated Cambodia than a country full of incompetents!" The speaker of this chilling statement is Douch, the Khmer Rouge true believer who ran the camp that held French ethnologist Bizot for the closing months of 1971, several years before the Marxist revolutionaries unleashed massive bloodshed on the small Southeast Asian country. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge's chaotic occupation of Phnom Penh confined the small French community in the city to the premises of the French embassy, the portal of which supplies this volume with its title. Married to a Cambodian citizen, Bizot was an unusual Westerner there, in that once the terror started, he showed little inclination to flee the country. Bizot exploited his status as a rare Khmer-speaking Westerner not only to escape execution but also to extract a measure of autonomy for himself. He frequently showed remarkable defiance toward his heavily armed and ruthless captors. Bizot's account maintains a melancholy tone throughout. Despite his frequent heroic acts, Bizot emphasizes his own frailty and weakness-when he's not looking to set the record straight. He remains especially angry at Western leftists who insisted that the Vietnamese played little role in Cambodia despite ample evidence to the contrary. What's especially striking is the apparent contradiction between Bizot's sympathetic portrait of Douch and his description of the countless murders Douch committed in the name of the revolution. For many Americans, the senseless tragedy of Cambodia remains a mystery; this elegant volume helps outline the contours of that tragedy from a unique perspective. Maps. 40,000 first printing.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Scholar Bizot was arrested in early 1970s Cambodia on the charge of being an American spy and eventually became the only Westerner ever to escape from a Khmer Rouge prison. Here's his story.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Le Carre may have exaggerated, however...
By Kindle Customer
....there is much to admire and enjoy in this front-row seat to a time of unspeakable barbarism often forgotten.
Bizot's obeservations of life among his captors offer a rare look into the psyche of figures like Douche (the Tuol Sleng prison director). This is much more intimate than a broad historical perspective some felt his narrative lacked. Indeed, this is the way in which many of us would have experienced such history had we been as unfortunate as Bizot.
Bizot also offers the reader a romantic view of the land and people of Cambodia. At times the words rise to level of prose (translation issues aside). Any who have visited this beautiful country will certainly appreciate the deserved praise for its beauty.
As a point of criticism, it seems that the quality of writing suffers as Bizot's own interest in the story diminishes. For example, the title image of the Gate was discarded entirely after the first chapter; a missed opportunity to tie together the books loose ends (where was the editor?). Also, the curious relationship with his daughter's mother (his wife?) begs explanation.
Le Carre exaggerated in calling this book a classic. Yet despite its failings, a reader with some knowledge of the period, and an appreciation of a romantic and decidedly French point of view, will not be dissapointed.
4 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Book was OK, I didn't like it when facts are not straight
By A Customer
I read that book a while ago. I like David Chandler's "Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison" much better. But anyway, this book was about Bizot, the Frenchmen, who narrating his ordeal on 2 different occasions of time frame:
1) In 1971 while doing his research on Cambodian (Khmer) Bhudism near Phnom Undong, he was captured and held for prisoner by the Khmer Rouge for 3 months. Bizot accounted his experiencewhere he met the Douch -- the latter day infamous S21 Tuol Sleng Prison Director.
2) In April 1975 at the fall of Phnom Penh goverment, the victorious Khmer Rouge took over the country. France consulate general office was the only embassy left where thousand of people seek for asylum. Bizot accounted his experience during the cramped living condition and pressure from the Khmer Rouge to shut the embassy down and expelled everyone to the Thai border by trucks.
Francois Bizot is a pretty good story teller. Euan Cameron, the translator should be creditted the same,if not better than Bizot. Cameron has done an excellent job on choosing words and phrases that make the story very smooth. Bizot said he was married to a Cambodian woman and had a daughter named Helene, with her. Throughout the story he rarely said anthing about his Cambodian wife whom he refers to as "Helene's mother". So many questions left unanswered. What happen to Helene's mother ? Why didn't he come to the French embassy at the fall of Phnom Penh with Helen's Mother? Why didn't Bizot try to save her ? He mentioned about his dog, Avi, who he brought to the embassy. Mentioned nothing about Helene's mother. Bizot's heart was as cold as his compatriot, Laporte, who allowed to have the Khmer Rouge cadres pulled the Cambodian wife away at the Thai border crossing.
The story didn't really captivate me. Bizot doesn't seem to do much of a research on his writing. On one part he wrote so negatively about Cambodia. Page 106, Bizot described the Khmer kings as "cynical", "self-style" who rarely represented the land of the Khmer. On the same page, Bizot mentioned at the court in Phnom Penh, Siamese language was spoken there until recently. I would challenge Bizot be a little more clearer on where did he get his facts from. Khmer people were indigenous to the region. It is the other otherway around that the Thai borrow heavily from Khmer words and currently using a lot of Khmer words. A score of zero to Bizot on this page of writing.
I am sorry to say Bizot fell short of my expectation.
68 of 78 people found the following review helpful.
The book of a lifetime.
By Richard Arant
Since I met the author in Chiang Mai a decade ago -- when he somewhat reluctantly described his experiences as a prisoner inside the infamous Khmer Rouge M13 prison camp commanded by "Douch" and gave me a copy of the safe-travel pass written for him by a North Vietnamese officer during the first of Bizot's many brushes with death -- this was the one great book I impatiently awaited. As it turns out, "The Gate" is far more powerful than I could ever have imagined. Readers will find it painful to read through their tears, but will be unable to lay the book down. As John Le Carre writes in the foreword, "Now and then you read a book, and, as you put it down, you realize that you envy everybody who has not read it, simply because, unlike you, they will have the experience before them." The brilliantly written introduction shows how little the world has changed since the historic disaster in Cambodia. In contrast to many Frenchmen, Bizot saw the Americans as allies in 1970, but recognized an "inexcusable naivete" in the Americans, and he comments, "I do not know what to reproach them for more, their intervention or their withdrawal." As for the French government of that day he comments, "... fear of appearing to support the Americans so froze minds that nowhere in Europe were people free enough to voice their indignation and denounce the lies (of the Vietnamese and Cambodian communist revolutions)." In one of his verbal duels with his interrogator, Bizot questions the insane logic of the revolutionary, asking if the Khmer Rouge cadre did not see that the revolutionary line was just a trick constructed using basic Buddhist traditions to deceive the people and itself, just as it used the name of Sihanouk as a mask. For me there will never be another book quite like Bizot's to come from a Westerner. Bizot is a man who lives life his way, thinks his own thoughts, follows no man or no government blindly. A true citizen of the world. Fortunately, Cambodians have recently started writing their own stories, and it will truly take river of ink to record the horrors they have experienced. New books by the Documentation Center of Cambodia (dccam.org) go into great detail on the barbaric tortures used at camp M13 and at Tuol Sleng, tortures which even Bizot could not have dreamed of at the time he was held there.
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