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The atrocities of the Third Reich and the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in World War II have been extensively archived in survivors' accounts, scholarly histories and documentary films. Yet the gruesome orgy of self-vivisection carried out in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1978 left behind far fewer records. History in Cambodia remains intertwined with legend, as it has since the classical era of Angkor, and the regime's reign of terror was hideously efficient, leaving very few survivors to give witness to the inner workings of the machinery of death.
The Gate, the memoirs of François Bizot, a French scholar of Cambodian Buddhism who plausibly claims to be the only Westerner released from a Khmer Rouge prison—a jungle hellhole called Anlong Veng—now delivers a cruel, irrefutable indictment. The book is at once a major historical document, informed by a thoughtful analysis of the human response to suffering and death, and an exhilarating war narrative.
The greatest tribute to Bizot's literary talents is that one believes every word of his phantasmagoric tale. In his foreword, John le Carré calls the book "that rarest thing: an original classic." And he's right; Bizot's suspenseful pacing and his ability to penetrate the souls of the players in his drama place the book in the great tradition of moralistic French thrillers. The scene where the author, just released from prison, emerges from the jungle on foot to deliver a secret communiqué from the Khmer Rouge to the French chargé d'affaires is straight out of The Count of Monte Cristo.
The book comprises two main narratives: that of Bizot's imprisonment in Anlong Veng in 1970, when the Khmer Rouge were still a rural guerrilla movement, and that of his return to Phnom Penh in 1975, when he showed up at the French embassy at the exact moment the Khmer Rouge arrived. As the only person there fluent in both French and Khmer, he served as the principal liaison between the French and the new regime, a job that gave him a first-hand view of the enforced evacuation of the city. One of his principal duties was to help man the entrance to the French compound, the eponymous gate, where Cambodians frantically sought refuge from the bloody maelstrom raging outside.
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We forget that those responsible for the madness were themselves human, albeit tragically flawed. In the first part of the book, Bizot's portrait of Ta Douch, his jailer at Anlong Veng, provides unique insight into the single-mindedness that is often the wellspring of genocide. Douch later presided over Tuol Sleng, the regime's most infamous prison, now a museum, in Phnom Penh. The horror of the tortures and murders committed there, the sheer accumulation of human gore, leads many contemporary visitors to conclude that it must have been the work of monsters. Yet in fact it was the work of the sons of the Cambodian kampung—which is precisely what makes it so shocking.
The book's transcriptions of the philosophical discussions between prisoner and jailer about Buddhism and revolution offer an unprecedented opportunity to peer into the origins of mass dementia. Even as his minions are starving and bludgeoning their prisoners to death, Douch tells Bizot, "The revolution wishes nothing for (the people) besides simple happiness: that of the peasant who feeds himself from the fruits of his labors, with no need for the Western products that have made him a dependent consumer." When Bizot points out that Cambodian peasants are destitute of almost everything, including imports, Douch is deaf to him: years before the triumph of the Khmer Rouge, both the man and the system had sacrificed basic human values for the sake of abstract, lethal rhetoric.
Bizot is also an unsparing observer of the regime's victims, particularly the foreigners who sought refuge at the embassy. When a group of them are finally given safe passage to Thailand, one American journalist fills his only bag with silver plate stolen from the embassy dining room. At the final checkpoint, within sight of freedom, a French radio announcer, hysterical with fear, renounces his Khmer bride and allows her and her child to be dragged away.
Although it is written in an extravagantly emotional style and is at times deeply moving, The Gate is ultimately more historical document than literary memoir. Bizot assumes that his readers have a thorough knowledge of modern Cambodian history, sometimes identifying even obscure figures by surname only. Although future historians may not find in The Gate the definitive history of Cambodia's genocide, as a witness to that terror, Bizot's account will surely inspire an enduring fascination.
- Jamie James
- A Frenchman's memoirs shed new light on the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge