Music through the Dark: A Tale of Survival in Cambodia

"I cannot tell you how or why I survived; I do not know myself. It is like this: love and music and memory and invisible hands, and something that comes out of the society of the living and the dead, for which there are no words."

So begins the extraordinary story of one man's experience of Cambodia's holocaust during the 1970s. As Anne Frank did in her Diary, Daran Kravanh takes readers into the heart of a horrifying tragedy, one that claimed the lives of his parents and seven siblings and as many as three million other Cambodians. Among those murdered were thousands of intellectuals and artists; as a musician, Daran was himself a target for execution, but it was his talent for playing the accordion that saved his life. Throughout the Khmer Rouge period, the accordion became for Daran a seemingly enchanted instrument through which the spirit of life traveled.

"We are privileged to have the story of Daran Kravanh's life during the Khmer Rouge genocidal reign told so beautifully. Bree Lafreniere allows us to understand the greatness of the spirit and its ultimate triumph over darkness. This book is an extraordinary record of the Cambodian soul."­—Dith Pran, Cambodian holocaust survivor whose story inspired an award­winning film, The Killing Fields