Johnny Hachem doesn’t talk about his early life the way most people talk about childhood. What he remembers, he says, is sound and not the kind most children grow up hearing.
“The first sounds I really remember are explosions,” Hachem said. “You learn very quickly what they mean, and what to do.”
What he remembers most vividly is his parents pressing cotton into his ears on the nights the bombing came close, so that he might somehow find sleep through the noise. It is the kind of detail that stops you. Not a memory of comfort exactly, but of love doing what it could against impossible circumstances.
Hachem, now based in the United States, grew up in a region torn apart by armed conflict, an experience he has kept largely private throughout a career that has taken him from composition studios to concert halls across Europe and the Middle East. That changes this month with the release of his memoir, The War That Raised Me – A Childhood Without Safety, now available on Amazon Kindle.
The book is, by his own description, an attempt to connect the dots between where he came from and the music he makes.
For those familiar with his orchestral work, those dots aren’t hard to follow. Hachem has earned a reputation and, over the years, a dozen international composition awards, for music that veers between sweeping drama and sudden, fragile stillness. Critics and collaborators have often described it as cinematic, emotionally unguarded. Listening to it, you sense something deeply personal underneath. The memoir is his way of confirming that instinct.
“I didn’t write this to be a victim,” he said. “I wrote it because I think people hear the music and feel something, and I wanted them to understand where that comes from.”
The book traces his path from a childhood spent navigating the daily uncertainty and fear of life in a conflict zone, to a career performing his own compositions for philharmonic audiences around the world. It is a journey that few could have predicted, and fewer still could have endured. It touches on faith, identity, and the quiet, grinding work of rebuilding yourself far from everything you once knew.
There is something striking about the fact that a man whose earliest memories were shaped by the unbearable noise of war would go on to spend his life mastering sound. Every quiet passage in his music, every sudden surge, carries the weight of that child lying in the dark with cotton in his ears, waiting for the bombing to stop.
What comes through most clearly, even in conversation, is that Hachem is not interested in spectacle. He speaks carefully, without self-pity, and pushes back gently when the word “inspiring” comes up, a word, he notes, that can sometimes flatten what was simply a matter of survival.
“I didn’t have a choice about the war,” he said. “I had a choice about what I did with what it left behind.”
The memoir is his first book. He continues to perform, compose, and speak publicly about resilience and the role of creativity in processing trauma, carrying a story that, for a long time, only his music could tell.
The War That Raised Me is available now in eBook format on Amazon.
