Participants

Denise Affonço (1944) was born in Phnom Penh (Cambodia) of a French father and Vietnamese mother. She was working as a secretary in the French embassy in Phnom Penh at the time of the Khmer Rouge coup d’état in 1975 and decided to remain in Cambodia with her husband and children. Shortly afterwards, they were deported to the countryside where they were subjected to all kinds of torments and her husband and daughter died. In 1979, the Vietnamese invasion liberated the country of the Khmer Rouge regime and, a few months later, Denise Affonço testified in the trial in Phnom Penh against its leaders Ieng Sary and Pol Pot. The notes she wrote while preparing her testimony were to constitute the groundwork for her book To the End of Hell, which was first published in France in 2005. Denise Affonço is presently living in Paris.