Killing fields survivor tells his harrowing tale

Speaks to students at Elizabethtown College

Oct 04, 2007
By MADELYN PENNINO, Staff
Intelligencer Journal (Lancaster, PA, USA)

ELIZABETHTOWN, Pa. - Arn Chorn-Pond saw more of the dark side of human life by age 13 than most people ever will.

In his youth, he escaped from the Cambodian "killing fields" only to be forced into military service. He fled into the jungles of Southeast Asia, where he languished, suffering from malaria and malnutrition. He weighed a mere 30 pounds when several women found him and took him to a refugee camp in Thailand.

There, Chorn-Pond's physical wounds began to heal. But his emotional wounds remained raw for years.

Chorn-Pond, now 37, is an internationally recognized human-rights leader. He told his story Wednesday at Elizabethtown College as part of the school's "World in Focus" colloquium for first-year students.

The killing fields were sites throughout Cambodia (modern Kampuchea) where the communist regime of Pol Pot herded its citizens in the late 1970s and worked or starved them to death, or killed them outright. An estimated 2 million perished, amounting to more than a quarter of the country's population.

In 1975, when Chorn-Pond was 9, the communist Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia. He said Khmer Rouge soldiers told his village Americans were going to bomb the country and ordered everyone to leave their homes and go to the countryside.

"I heard the word 'American' but I didn't know what an American was, because I had never seen one," Chorn-Pond said. "My 12 brothers and sisters went into the country and held hands. We didn't want to get lost."

But Chorn-Pond and his siblings were separated, and he was captured and sent to a work camp.

While imprisoned at the camp along with 700 other children, Chorn-Pond spent 20-hour days working in the rice fields. Sometimes they went weeks without food.

Born into a family of performers and musicians, Chorn-Pond avoided execution by playing the flute for camp guards.

"I played propaganda songs for them while they ate or before they went to bed," Chorn-Pond said.

Still, Chorn-Pond believed it was just a matter of time before he would die.

"They had turned a Buddhist temple into a prison," Chorn-Pond said. "Many children starved to death. I was forced to participate in executions. If I hadn't, I would have been killed."

In a 2003 documentary about his life called "The Flute Player," Chorn-Pond described his hell on earth.

"Every day I killed my own heart in order to survive it," Chorn-Pond said. "It was worse than a nightmare."

When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, Chorn-Pond fled his captors but was forced to join the Cambodian Army. Soon after he escaped to the jungle.

Chorn-Pond spent many months in the jungle until he was taken to a refugee camp, where he met Peter Pond, a Lutheran minister and aid worker.

Pond brought Chorn-Pond to New Hampshire and eventually adopted him, but Chorn-Pond could not escape the horror of his childhood.

His father, sensing he was near suicide, implored Chorn-Pond to talk about his experience.

Chorn-Pond first spoke to Amnesty International in 1984 and has since traveled the world speaking about his ordeal.

A graduate of Providence College in Rhode Island, Chorn-Pond has started several community rebuilding projects and founded organizations such as Children of War, Cambodian Volunteers for Community Development and Peace Makers, a U.S.-based gang-intervention project for Southeast Asian Youth.

In the mid-1990s, Chorn-Pond started Cambodian Masters Performers Programs, now known as Cambodian Living Arts, to help save his country's musical heritage.

"I knew traditional Cambodian music was dying out," Chorn-Pond said. "I wanted to do something."

Chorn-Pond has received a number of awards, including the Reebok Human Rights Award, the Anne Frank Memorial Award and the Kohl Foundation International Peace Prize.

E-mail: mpennino@lnpnews.com