Arn Chorn-Pond and his foster father, the Reverend Peter L. Pond in 1983.
Arn Chorn Pond's story of brutality and survival in Cambodia is the basis of a novel by Patricia McCormick
By SUSAN CARPENTER — Los Angeles Times
Posted: May 2, 2012;
"Never Fall Down" by Patricia McCormick; Balzer & Bray ($17.99, ages 14 and up)
When it comes to genocide, Hitler is obviously well covered.
There are countless titles for young readers about the atrocities he
inspired. The Khmer Rouge, which seized control of Cambodia in 1975 and,
in its attempts to create an agrarian form of communism, killed
millions of its own people, is less familiar territory, especially for
young readers.
"Never Fall Down" offers a detailed look at
what it was like to live under such a cruel government from the
perspective of one of its best-known survivors, Arn Chorn Pond.
Pond was 11 when his village was invaded by the Khmer Rouge and his
family was forced to march toward an uncertain future. Pond thought it
was exciting at first, but after walking for days, passing babies left
crying in the middle of the road and ditches filling with dead bodies,
he began to realize: He wouldn't be returning home in three days as his
captors had said.
"Never Fall Down" is written in broken
English from Pond's present-tense point of view, which adds to the
story's authenticity and immediacy. But it is, in the end, a novel.
Patricia McCormick spent hundreds of hours interviewing Pond. She
traveled to Cambodia with the now-45-year-old to retrace his every step
during the three years, eight months and 20 days that the Khmer Rouge
held power. She retraced his escape through a Thai refugee camp and
interviewed members of his adoptive American family.
Though
"Arn can recall certain experiences in chilling detail; others he can
tell only in vague generalities," McCormick writes in an author's note
at the end of the book, explaining her decision to write Pond's true
story as fiction. "He can describe the eerie click of a land mine being
sprung and the hideous stink of a gangrenous leg ... but no one,
especially not an eleven-year-old caught in the insanity of genocide,
can remember conversations, dates, and places - especially when the
perpetrators worked so hard to distort reality at every turn."
"Never Fall Down" is similar to Dave Eggers' fictionalized memoir of
Sudanese child soldier Valentino Achak Deng in "What Is the What," but
it differs from McCormick's 2008 National Book Award finalist, "Sold."
For that book she interviewed several Nepalese and Indian sex slave
survivors, fusing their stories into a single, fictionalized character.
"Never Fall Down" is a blend of Pond's memories and McCormick's research
and imagination.
"The truth," McCormick explains to readers, "is right there between the lines."
And it is horrifying. It's difficult to believe anyone was able to
survive the atrocities Pond endured, which began with forced labor in
the rice fields that often started at 4 in the morning and lasted until
the dark of night, with only a bowl of thin rice soup thickened with
dirt as nourishment.
Eventually, as the Khmer Rouge took away
professors, businessmen and anyone else with any connection to
capitalism, Pond learned they were being executed and pushed into mass
graves. He volunteered to learn an instrument that he played with part
of a ragtag music group to cover the sound of the killings - a move that
likely saved his life.
These scenes are described in
horrifyingly vivid detail, but just when readers think the level of
human depravity couldn't possibly worsen, it does. Some forced laborers,
whose bellies had become distended through famine, resorted to
cannibalism, for which they were killed. Pond was forced to bury the
bodies in an ever-growing pile. Then, when the Vietnamese invaded and
Pond was forced to become a soldier for the Khmer Rouge, he too became a
killer.
Separated from his family and his friends, Pond made
his way to a refugee camp, where he suspected he may have survived only
to die of a broken heart.
"All the time you are fighting,
you think only of how to survive. All the time you survive, you wonder
why you don't die," said Pond, who, after moving to the U.S. and
enduring the usual traumas of assimilation, decided upon a third choice:
to live.
It's a marvel not only that Pond escaped but is
sane enough to recount his story. Since 1984, he has been a human rights
activist and champion of Cambodia's traditional music.
Pond's early life is an incredible story of survival against all odds,
of innocence unduly robbed. By turns terrifying, heartbreaking and
triumphant, "Never Fall Down" is as likely to inspire tears as it is to
stick with readers for a lifetime.
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