One day in October, 1971, the life of a young French scholar named Francois Bizot changed forever. On the way to a temple in rural Cambodia, Bizot was abducted by the Khmer Rouge. During his captivity, deep in the jungle, shackled to a tree, he developed a strangely close relationship with his captor, Douch, who later became the chief commandant of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison.
There, tens of thousands of Cambodians were brutally tortured and executed. But the captor did spare one life. Francois Bizot was the only Westerner to survive imprisonment by the Khmer Rouge. Thirty years later, he shares his remarkable story with us. Francois Bizot and his memoir of captivity, The Gate.
Guests:
Francois Bizot, Ethnologist and Chair of Southeast Asian Buddhism at the Sorbonne in Paris and author of “The Gate.”