The Gate - Softcover

An ethnologist describes his sojourn in rural Cambodia in 1971 as a scholar of Khmer pottery and Buddhism, his arrest and captivity by the Khmer Rouge as genocide swept through the country, his relationship with his captor, his role during the escape from the doomed capital of Phnom Penh, and other memories of the "killing fields" of Cambodia. 40,000 first printing.

nd historical tour de force: what one man saw and did in a land of pristine beauty on the eve of one of the twentieth century’s most barbaric spectacles.

In 1971, François Bizot was a young French scholar of Khmer pottery and Buddhist ritual working in rural Cambodia. Now, more than thirty years later, he has summoned up the unbearable memory of that moment, letting us see as never before those years leading inexorably to genocide. Perfectly recalled, in-delibly written, The Gate recounts the nightmare of Bizot’s arrest and captivity on suspicion of being an American spy, and his nearly miraculous survival as the only Westerner ever to escape a Khmer Rouge prison. It is the story, as well, of Bizot’s unlikely friendship with his captor, Douch–a figure today better remembered as a ruthless perpetrator of the then-looming terror, about which Bizot tried, without success, to warn his government.

Bizot’s experience to that point would itself ha