Brothers

Three years ago, I had a life-changing experience: I met a brother I never knew I had. His name is Arn Chorn Pond.

It began with an invitation to speak at an International Holocaust Commemoration event in Scotland. I had shared the story of my rescue during the Holocaust by an Indonesian family and their Muslim nanny living in Holland countless times and was reluctant to go to Glasgow, Scotland, at the end of January. But finally, through the bullying of a good friend who is a Holocaust educator and who had suggested my name to the event organizers, Interfaith Scotland, I agreed to go. What set the event apart from all the others I had participated in was that I, a child survivor of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, would be paired with a child survivor of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Arn was ten years old when he was captured by the Khmer Rouge and marched to a prison camp housed in a Buddhist pagoda, Wat Eick, about ten miles from the town he grew up in, Battambang. On the plane from Washington, DC, to Glasgow, I read the book Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick*, a historical novel based on Arn’s story, and conveyed in his voice.

“We walk three day, one long line of kid, all in black, one black snake with five hundred eye . . . After all that walking we come to a temple. A big temple in the country with red roof like wing and many building all around. Long wood building for monk to live, for the nun, all empty now. Also big tamarind tree. And a pond with morning glory and whisker fish. And a mango grove. Very beautiful and quiet, very quiet, with Buddha eyes on top of the temple, watching everything . . . We get up before the sun, have only a little rice soup, then work in the rice field all day, hot, hot sun burning our skin, mud coming up to our knee . . . One time I hear kid ask where is his sister. The Khmer Rouge laugh and say she is still working in the field, ‘only now she is fertilizer.’” 

Arn survived the hunger and hardship of three years in the camp by volunteering to play in a band. “Another meeting. This time high-ranking Khmer Rouge says, ‘Who can play music?’ No one, not one kid make a move . . . I think maybe this is test, new way to find out who has education and music lesson.” But then Arn raises his hand. “Just give me one bowl of rice,” he thinks, “then you can kill me.” Arn and five boys are given five days with an old music teacher to learn a number of instruments, Arn a hammered stringed instrument called a khim and later a flute, the khloy. And, when the five days are up, the music teacher, having done what the Khmer Rouge needed him for, is killed. The music played by the kids is amplified throughout the camp to cover the sounds of skulls being cracked “like coconuts,” is how I hear Arn describe it. It is, the Khmer Rouge’s preferred way of killing their perceived enemies—the educated, those whose skin was deemed too light, those who wore glasses.

Arn and I told our stories at 12 different venues over three days—elementary schools, high schools, universities, and fancy government buildings. And gradually, our stories melded into each other’s. Arn spoke with tears in his eyes about the death of my sisters killed in Auschwitz and played the flute as the picture of Mima Saina, the Indonesian woman who became my mother through the years I was hidden with the Madna family, was shown on the screen. And, I talked about Mek, Arn’s second music teacher, to whom he ascribes his ultimate survival and whose life he, in turn, was to save many years later.

“That night we go to building where the new music teacher sleep. This guy not really asleep, just looking far away into the air. I shake him, say, ‘Wake up. They gonna kill you if you don’t teach us to play good.’ He says he doesn’t care. He says already he’s dead in his heart. His children, all dead; his wife, he doesn’t know where she is . . . ’ So they can kill me,’ he says. ‘It’s okay.’ I hit this guy with my fist. ‘Okay if you die!’ I say. ‘But what about us? You don’t teach us to play, we die too. Us kid. Like your kid die, we will die also.’ Now he wake up. First time any light in his eye.”

Many, many years later, after Arn had returned to Cambodia from the United States, where he had been adopted, he found Mek reduced to a skeleton, sitting along the roadside. Arn brought him back to life and made him one of the first masters to fulfill his mission of bringing renewal, healing, and reconciliation through music to the people of Cambodia.

We talked about the challenge of erasing hate in the world—I about the man in post-war Holland who, upon seeing the Auschwitz tattoo on my mother’s arm, said, “There is one they didn’t get,” and he about the American kids who called him “monkey” and told him, “Go back to where you came from.” And, that is how we came to realize we were brothers—brothers linked through human cruelty, but brothers linked also through human kindness and heroism. As my halfIndonesian foster brother Rob Madna, a man who really could pass for Arn’s brother, used to say in response to the puzzled looks of his friends when he introduced me as his brother, “Different fathers . . . and yes, different mothers, but brothers.”

* McCormick, Patricia. Never Fall Down. New York: HarperCollins, 2012.

©2017, Alfred Münzer. The text, images, and audio and video clips on this website are available for limited non-commercial, educational, and personal use only, or for fair use as defined in the United States copyright laws.