When the Holocaust happened, people said it would never happen again. Then came Cambodia, and Bosnia, and East Timor, and on and on. But the author says there's another important reason her book has caught on. But I think that the fact that I came from adversity and survived to do the work I'm doing gets people's interest. What kept me alive was my family.
People understand that, no matter where they live.
Everybody wants to feel their father's arms around them. FROM 1975 TO 1979, the Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 2 million Cambodians. With numbers like that, it's easy to lose sight of individual victims. But Ung's memoir gives faces to the dead. Her family's struggle for survival was unimaginably grim.