Word: gateful
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...What shall I do? Order you to shoot?" As a crowd of 20,000 of his countrymen implored him to "Open the gate!" on that chaotic Thursday evening, Harald Jager, head of passport control at the Berlin Wall's Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint, kept shouting that rhetorical question at the guards under his command. It was nearly 11 p.m., four hours since Jager heard the stunning news on TV: the East German Politburo, responding to weeks of peaceful demonstrations and a flood of refugees fleeing through Hungary and Czechoslovakia, had announced that all citizens could leave East Germany at any crossing...
...Gate, the memoirs of Fran?ois 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 The book is at once a major historical document, informed by a thoughtful analysis of the human response to suffering and death, and an exhilarating war narrative...
...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...
...Cambodia strewn with bales of newly worthless bank notes; a former Prime Minister's wife trying to throw her baby over the embassy fence, before she is led away to be executed; a prince of the ancien r?gime, wearing his Legion of Honor medal, being turned away from the gate...
...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it is written in an extravagantly emotional style and is at times deeply moving, The Gate is ultimately more historical document than literary memoir.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...