Music Through the Dark: A Tale of Survival in Cambodia (Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies)

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.