Fran�ois Bizot, is the only Westerner to have survived imprisonment by the Khmer Rouge. Bizot arrived in Cambodia in 1965 to study Buddhism practiced in the countryside. He traveled extensively around Cambodia, researching the history and customs of its dominant religion. He speaks fluent Khmer, French and English and was married to a Cambodian with whom he had a daughter, H�l�ne, in 1968. When the Vietnam War spilled into Cambodia, Bizot was employed at the Angkor Conservation Office, restoring ceramics and bronzes. Bizot, at first, welcomed the American intervention in Cambodia, hoping that they might counter the rising influence of the Communists. "But their irresponsibility, the inexcusable naivete, even their cynicism, frequently aroused more fury and outrage in me than did the lies of the Communists. Throughout those years of war, as I frantically scoured the hinterland for the old manuscripts that the heads of monasteries had secreted in lacquered chests, I witnessed the Americans' imperviousness to the realities of Cambodia," wrote Bizot in his memoirs of the time. 

February 8th, 1940 in Nancy (Age 84)