While the United States battled Vietnamese Communists in the 1960s and 1970s, in neighboring Cambodia, dictator Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge declared war on their own people, enslaving and slaughtering anybody who disagreed with them. Sichan Siv knew he would soon be a target — ending up perhaps as one of the millions of anonymous human skeletons buried in his nation's killing fields. So he heeded his mother's pleas and ran. Captured and forced to perform slave labor, Siv feared that he would be worked to death or killed. It was only a matter of time. But he never abandoned hope or his improbable dream of freedom — a dream that liberated him, astonishingly, from his brutal captors and ultimately led him to the United States, where he later became a senior White House aide.

Ambassador Siv is the author of Golden Bones, which chronicles his experiences. He will discuss his work in this public lecture.