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Personal history: Remembering the Armenian Genocide
pressherald.com/2015/04/12/remembering-the-armenian-genocide/
By John Christie
Portland Press Herald, Maine
April 12, 2015
On a spring day in 1909, in a hill town swept by the breezes of the
eastern Mediterranean Sea, a 10-year-girl was sent to her family's
pasture to round up their cows.
She was Gulenia Hovsepian, a little Armenian girl living just outside
the Turkish village of Suediya. In English, her name means Rose.
She finished her chore and started back up the hill to her home,
running through the mulberry trees her father grew to feed the
family's silkworms.
`And I was coming back to the mulberry trees and the mulberry trees
were tapping my face, and I was running, and I was a kid and hadn't
eaten yet, nothing,' she recalled in a recording she made at age
91. `A boy, a Turkish boy, by the neighbors, hollers to me, I never
forget it, never could forget it. In Turkish he said, `They're killing
the giaour, the kafir.' '
`They' were the Turks. The Armenians were the giaour, the kafir - the
infidels.
What history records as the Adana massacre was beginning through a
region of Turkey that was Cilician Armenia 1,000 years before and was
still the home of tens of thousands of Armenians.
`Adana was the turning point for the Armenians,' wrote Peter Balakian
in `The Burning Tigris,' his much-praised history of the Armenian
Genocide. `The massacres there were another major step in the
devaluation of this minority culture, and a step forward on the road
to genocide.'
Balakian cites a report that 15,000 to 25,000 people were killed in
the massacres, including children and teachers in a school that was
set afire. Those that didn't die in the fire were shot as they tried
to escape.
The Armenian Genocide - one of the earlier recorded genocides - began
100 years ago this year throughout Ottoman Turkey. Armenians all over
the world - including half a million in the U.S. - will be
commemorating the anniversary in 2015, especially on Remembrance Day,
April 24.
The massacres of the 1890s and 1900s and the genocide stemmed from a
longstanding hatred and resentment of the Christian Armenians (Armenia
was the first nation to declare itself Christian, in 301 A.D.) by the
Muslim majority, and the rise of Turkish nationalism and militarism.
Under the leadership of the minister of the interior, Talaat Pasha,
Turkey passed laws to forcibly deport Armenians and confiscate their
homes and property. Then they were marched across deserts, where many
starved to death. Others were outright murdered: shot, bayoneted,
burned to death in barns, driven over cliffs, crucified and
flayed. Woman were raped or forced to marry ethnic Turks.
The U.S. ambassador to Turkey at the time was Henry Morgenthau, a
tireless advocate for what became in the U.S. a catchphrase: `the
starving Armenians.' In a letter to the secretary of state in July
1915, Morgenthau describes what was happening in Turkey:
The `deportation and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing
and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses it appears that a campaign
of race extermination is in progress ...'
Except for those few Turks who were assassinated in the 1920s by
Armenian rebels, no one has ever been held responsible for the
Armenian `Race Murder,' the title of the first chapter in Samantha
Power's groundbreaking history of genocide, `A Problem from Hell.'
In 1939, during of the Nazi genocide of European Jews, Adolf Hitler
expressed confidence he could get away with anything: `Who today,
after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?'
Now, 75 years after Hitler's dismissal, the world has not forgotten,
especially those like myself who grew up with a victim of the Turkish
atrocities.
In 1948, that little girl who ran through the mulberry trees became my
grandmother, Rose Hovsepian Banaian =80` my Nana. Until I was 12 years
old, we lived in the same tenement: she and her unmarried children in
the end unit; my mother (her oldest daughter), and my Irish father, my
brother and I in the middle tenement on a dead end street in Dover,
New Hampshire.
I knew from talks around family dinners, especially the Sunday
picnics, that Nana was a refugee from the genocide; I knew her father
and mother had died at Turkish hands; and I knew she escaped through
Egypt and came to the U.S. as the arranged bride of an Armenian man
who had also escaped the genocide.
I say I knew this, but I had never written anything down, nor asked
for precise details.
My search for Nana's story - and my story - brought me to a 1990
recording of Nana that begins in that Turkish pasture so many years
ago.
`I SAW MY FATHER RUNNING'
Nana raced home on that day 81 years ago and 5000
miles away from where she would make her American life.
`I saw my father running. He had his rifle, his sword, his pistol
... he hugged me and he kissed me but he didn't say nuthin'. But he
was running, he ran into that brook, to follow the brook.'
He was headed to the village center to join other Armenian men to
resist the Turks. He never made it.
Nana begins to tell what happened next: `Before he get there, on the
hill he met a ...' and her voice just stops. Nothing for
seconds. Then: `All I'll say is, hundreds of them. He was killed. He
was beaten. Because he couldn't fight all those people. He tried, he
did. They had taken everything off him, only his white shirt, homespun
white shirt that goes way down to the knee. It's all homespun, rough
stuff, and left him there. Left him there.'
>From that day in 1909 until she arrived at Ellis Island in 1921 and
married John Banaian, Gulenia Hovsepian was taken out of her simple
farm life and tossed onto the world stage, one of the millions of
victims in the shattering events that culminated in World War I.
HIDING FROM THE TURKS
While her recollections at age 91 sometimes wandered across time
periods and left some crucial storylines incomplete, her gift for the
telling detail and the turning-point event is novelistic.
After her father was killed, the family - mother Marian and her five
children, from 10-month-old Movses to Sara, 13 - had to escape. They
made their way to the nearby factory where silk was woven, where the
owner agreed to hide them from the Turks. `They locked the door in
there, and we heard the soldiers going by because it was on the main
road and the baby started to cry and my mother would put her hand on
his mouth (so) they won't hear' her, Nana recalled.
They made their way to Antioch, where they were to be spared by
becoming - as Nana puts it - `Mohammedan.' In the massacres and later
in the genocide, conversion was sometimes offered as a way to avoid
deportation and possible death. But before that could happen, the
official killings stopped. Nana recalled: The sultan `had given orders
for the town criers to go around - it's not like papers now - town
criers to go around in the town, in the city, and they holler and
yell, `Stop it, don't kill no more.' '
Still, the family had lost their home, their source of income, their
very world.
Nana's hopes were with her Uncle George, who she believed was well off
and working for an Englishman in a cigarette factory in Cairo.
George had received word that his brother had been killed and his
family members were refugees. He arrived in Antioch and organized a
rescue of Nana and 45 other Armenian girls, including Nana's younger
sister, Violet.
=80=9CWe get all gathered, they had to take us in the dark to the
missionary ... My mother bathe me and comb my hair and she took a
little piece of cloth and put in there cucumbers and some kind of
bread they make of it, a lot of sesame seeds on it. She put that in
there for the two of us to eat. And when we get to Alexandretta (on
the Turkish coast) in a building, an empty building in there, and at
midnight, they took us out, but they served a meal there.
`All of a sudden, they came around: Get your bundle, what you have
with you. They were going to transfer us somewhere else. You know what
happened? We heard the story afterward. The Turks had take, you know
the gasoline, kerosene, I mean, comes in cans, in tin cans like that,
because we had to buy it ourselves for our home. They did it all
around the building. They were gonna put it on fire there. And someone
found out about it so they had to take us. Yeah, they were gonna burn
us all to death.'
The children were taken by ship to Beirut, where a German Lutheran
orphanage and school agreed to accept them. Nana stayed from age 10 to
age 16 in 1918, relatively safe from both the war and the genocide
that was killing hundreds of thousands of Armenians in neighboring
Turkey.
`IT MADE MY HEART IN PIECES'
Her mother, though, was not as fortunate. Every time the subject of
her mother comes up on the 1990 recording, Nana answers quickly - `My
mother died on the road' =80` and then changes the subject.
Historically, that makes sense. Even though Nana's mother escaped the
Adana massacre, she was a refugee and without resources when the 1915
genocide began. `Died on the road' could well refer to the most common
way Armenians were killed - by starvation and disease on forced
marches to concentration camps.
Movses, the youngest child, lived with sister Sarah and the man she
had married, in Antioch, but there was little food to feed the
family. Movses had only grass to eat and died, likely from severe
diarrhea or dysentery, Nana said.
`He died, starved to death three weeks before the armistice was
signed. The armistice was signed, they had PLENTY, PLENTY FOOD, the
Red Cross (she halts, sobs). He was about ... 10 years old. He
died. I'm never going to forgive anyone for that. Never! Never! It
broke my heart, made my heart in pieces.'
A friend from the Beirut orphanage was working as a nurse's aide in a
Cairo hospital, and helped Nana get a job there, where she stayed for
two years. Then, through a friend, the two got an offer to marry
Armenians who were living in America: `She had somebody that she knew,
she asked her how about bring two girls, there are two brothers here,
they like to marry Armenian girls. They say, they're pretty well off,
they got money, see.'
On Aug. 9, 1921, Nana and her friend boarded a train to Alexandria,
then a ship to Piraeus, Greece, and the King Alexander ocean liner to
Ellis Island, where she arrived just before Labor Day.
`I wanted to see America. I wasn't only interested in see a man, or
anything. I wanted to see America.'
It turns out, John Banaian, who was to be my grandfather, had no money
and lived in a shabby apartment with dish towels for curtains in the
worst section of Dover. But he was a typical immigrant - industrious
and frugal. Later, he bought the tenement house and they had six
children in seven and a half years. The youngest, Lillian, was but 10
months old when John Banaian died of pneumonia.
Nana was left with three boys and three girls; the oldest, my mother,
was 10. It was in the middle of the Depression. My mother became the
daytime mother while Nana went to work in the mills.
After World War II, my mother - who went by `Kay' rather than the
decidedly immigrant first name she was given, Kouharig - met and
married a local Irishman, Thomas Christie. I was born in 1948, the
first grandchild on my mother's side.
AN ANTIDOTE TO HARDSHIP
The lives of my mother and her mother - my Nana - were forged from
hardship and loss.
When I came along life was a little better. The American economy was
strong after the war: Dad, a World War II veteran, became a skilled
machinist; Mom worked the late shift at a nearby GE plant.
There were no luxuries, but my extended, deprived family made my life
as easy, as all-American, as they could. Perhaps in response to their
lives, mine was to be protected.
I was to be the antidote to their past, yet the family history seeped
into my consciousness, awaiting a deeper exploration of the past
opened up by Nana's recording.
Now, it takes but a plate of grape leaves I make from Nana's recipe,
and I can see her running through those mulberry trees while her
father - my great-grandfather - grabs his rifle and runs directly into
his murder. In that moment he enters the history of a people, the
history of a world soon afire, the history of one of mankind's worst
inventions: genocide.
On the recording, Nana, who died five years later at age 96, strays
from the narrative of her life to reflect upon history and the fact
that the Turkish government to this day officially denies the Armenian
Genocide:
`I don't know if the Turks would ever. But, ah, they're denying
it. I'm sorry to damn them - they don't want to admit it. I'm telling
you this: Where did I come from? Where did I get the story to tell you
about it?'
John Christie is a journalist living in Maine and writing a memoir,
`The Regretful Boy Scout.'
pressherald.com/2015/04/12/remembering-the-armenian-genocide/
By John Christie
Portland Press Herald, Maine
April 12, 2015
On a spring day in 1909, in a hill town swept by the breezes of the
eastern Mediterranean Sea, a 10-year-girl was sent to her family's
pasture to round up their cows.
She was Gulenia Hovsepian, a little Armenian girl living just outside
the Turkish village of Suediya. In English, her name means Rose.
She finished her chore and started back up the hill to her home,
running through the mulberry trees her father grew to feed the
family's silkworms.
`And I was coming back to the mulberry trees and the mulberry trees
were tapping my face, and I was running, and I was a kid and hadn't
eaten yet, nothing,' she recalled in a recording she made at age
91. `A boy, a Turkish boy, by the neighbors, hollers to me, I never
forget it, never could forget it. In Turkish he said, `They're killing
the giaour, the kafir.' '
`They' were the Turks. The Armenians were the giaour, the kafir - the
infidels.
What history records as the Adana massacre was beginning through a
region of Turkey that was Cilician Armenia 1,000 years before and was
still the home of tens of thousands of Armenians.
`Adana was the turning point for the Armenians,' wrote Peter Balakian
in `The Burning Tigris,' his much-praised history of the Armenian
Genocide. `The massacres there were another major step in the
devaluation of this minority culture, and a step forward on the road
to genocide.'
Balakian cites a report that 15,000 to 25,000 people were killed in
the massacres, including children and teachers in a school that was
set afire. Those that didn't die in the fire were shot as they tried
to escape.
The Armenian Genocide - one of the earlier recorded genocides - began
100 years ago this year throughout Ottoman Turkey. Armenians all over
the world - including half a million in the U.S. - will be
commemorating the anniversary in 2015, especially on Remembrance Day,
April 24.
The massacres of the 1890s and 1900s and the genocide stemmed from a
longstanding hatred and resentment of the Christian Armenians (Armenia
was the first nation to declare itself Christian, in 301 A.D.) by the
Muslim majority, and the rise of Turkish nationalism and militarism.
Under the leadership of the minister of the interior, Talaat Pasha,
Turkey passed laws to forcibly deport Armenians and confiscate their
homes and property. Then they were marched across deserts, where many
starved to death. Others were outright murdered: shot, bayoneted,
burned to death in barns, driven over cliffs, crucified and
flayed. Woman were raped or forced to marry ethnic Turks.
The U.S. ambassador to Turkey at the time was Henry Morgenthau, a
tireless advocate for what became in the U.S. a catchphrase: `the
starving Armenians.' In a letter to the secretary of state in July
1915, Morgenthau describes what was happening in Turkey:
The `deportation and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing
and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses it appears that a campaign
of race extermination is in progress ...'
Except for those few Turks who were assassinated in the 1920s by
Armenian rebels, no one has ever been held responsible for the
Armenian `Race Murder,' the title of the first chapter in Samantha
Power's groundbreaking history of genocide, `A Problem from Hell.'
In 1939, during of the Nazi genocide of European Jews, Adolf Hitler
expressed confidence he could get away with anything: `Who today,
after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?'
Now, 75 years after Hitler's dismissal, the world has not forgotten,
especially those like myself who grew up with a victim of the Turkish
atrocities.
In 1948, that little girl who ran through the mulberry trees became my
grandmother, Rose Hovsepian Banaian =80` my Nana. Until I was 12 years
old, we lived in the same tenement: she and her unmarried children in
the end unit; my mother (her oldest daughter), and my Irish father, my
brother and I in the middle tenement on a dead end street in Dover,
New Hampshire.
I knew from talks around family dinners, especially the Sunday
picnics, that Nana was a refugee from the genocide; I knew her father
and mother had died at Turkish hands; and I knew she escaped through
Egypt and came to the U.S. as the arranged bride of an Armenian man
who had also escaped the genocide.
I say I knew this, but I had never written anything down, nor asked
for precise details.
My search for Nana's story - and my story - brought me to a 1990
recording of Nana that begins in that Turkish pasture so many years
ago.
`I SAW MY FATHER RUNNING'
Nana raced home on that day 81 years ago and 5000
miles away from where she would make her American life.
`I saw my father running. He had his rifle, his sword, his pistol
... he hugged me and he kissed me but he didn't say nuthin'. But he
was running, he ran into that brook, to follow the brook.'
He was headed to the village center to join other Armenian men to
resist the Turks. He never made it.
Nana begins to tell what happened next: `Before he get there, on the
hill he met a ...' and her voice just stops. Nothing for
seconds. Then: `All I'll say is, hundreds of them. He was killed. He
was beaten. Because he couldn't fight all those people. He tried, he
did. They had taken everything off him, only his white shirt, homespun
white shirt that goes way down to the knee. It's all homespun, rough
stuff, and left him there. Left him there.'
>From that day in 1909 until she arrived at Ellis Island in 1921 and
married John Banaian, Gulenia Hovsepian was taken out of her simple
farm life and tossed onto the world stage, one of the millions of
victims in the shattering events that culminated in World War I.
HIDING FROM THE TURKS
While her recollections at age 91 sometimes wandered across time
periods and left some crucial storylines incomplete, her gift for the
telling detail and the turning-point event is novelistic.
After her father was killed, the family - mother Marian and her five
children, from 10-month-old Movses to Sara, 13 - had to escape. They
made their way to the nearby factory where silk was woven, where the
owner agreed to hide them from the Turks. `They locked the door in
there, and we heard the soldiers going by because it was on the main
road and the baby started to cry and my mother would put her hand on
his mouth (so) they won't hear' her, Nana recalled.
They made their way to Antioch, where they were to be spared by
becoming - as Nana puts it - `Mohammedan.' In the massacres and later
in the genocide, conversion was sometimes offered as a way to avoid
deportation and possible death. But before that could happen, the
official killings stopped. Nana recalled: The sultan `had given orders
for the town criers to go around - it's not like papers now - town
criers to go around in the town, in the city, and they holler and
yell, `Stop it, don't kill no more.' '
Still, the family had lost their home, their source of income, their
very world.
Nana's hopes were with her Uncle George, who she believed was well off
and working for an Englishman in a cigarette factory in Cairo.
George had received word that his brother had been killed and his
family members were refugees. He arrived in Antioch and organized a
rescue of Nana and 45 other Armenian girls, including Nana's younger
sister, Violet.
=80=9CWe get all gathered, they had to take us in the dark to the
missionary ... My mother bathe me and comb my hair and she took a
little piece of cloth and put in there cucumbers and some kind of
bread they make of it, a lot of sesame seeds on it. She put that in
there for the two of us to eat. And when we get to Alexandretta (on
the Turkish coast) in a building, an empty building in there, and at
midnight, they took us out, but they served a meal there.
`All of a sudden, they came around: Get your bundle, what you have
with you. They were going to transfer us somewhere else. You know what
happened? We heard the story afterward. The Turks had take, you know
the gasoline, kerosene, I mean, comes in cans, in tin cans like that,
because we had to buy it ourselves for our home. They did it all
around the building. They were gonna put it on fire there. And someone
found out about it so they had to take us. Yeah, they were gonna burn
us all to death.'
The children were taken by ship to Beirut, where a German Lutheran
orphanage and school agreed to accept them. Nana stayed from age 10 to
age 16 in 1918, relatively safe from both the war and the genocide
that was killing hundreds of thousands of Armenians in neighboring
Turkey.
`IT MADE MY HEART IN PIECES'
Her mother, though, was not as fortunate. Every time the subject of
her mother comes up on the 1990 recording, Nana answers quickly - `My
mother died on the road' =80` and then changes the subject.
Historically, that makes sense. Even though Nana's mother escaped the
Adana massacre, she was a refugee and without resources when the 1915
genocide began. `Died on the road' could well refer to the most common
way Armenians were killed - by starvation and disease on forced
marches to concentration camps.
Movses, the youngest child, lived with sister Sarah and the man she
had married, in Antioch, but there was little food to feed the
family. Movses had only grass to eat and died, likely from severe
diarrhea or dysentery, Nana said.
`He died, starved to death three weeks before the armistice was
signed. The armistice was signed, they had PLENTY, PLENTY FOOD, the
Red Cross (she halts, sobs). He was about ... 10 years old. He
died. I'm never going to forgive anyone for that. Never! Never! It
broke my heart, made my heart in pieces.'
A friend from the Beirut orphanage was working as a nurse's aide in a
Cairo hospital, and helped Nana get a job there, where she stayed for
two years. Then, through a friend, the two got an offer to marry
Armenians who were living in America: `She had somebody that she knew,
she asked her how about bring two girls, there are two brothers here,
they like to marry Armenian girls. They say, they're pretty well off,
they got money, see.'
On Aug. 9, 1921, Nana and her friend boarded a train to Alexandria,
then a ship to Piraeus, Greece, and the King Alexander ocean liner to
Ellis Island, where she arrived just before Labor Day.
`I wanted to see America. I wasn't only interested in see a man, or
anything. I wanted to see America.'
It turns out, John Banaian, who was to be my grandfather, had no money
and lived in a shabby apartment with dish towels for curtains in the
worst section of Dover. But he was a typical immigrant - industrious
and frugal. Later, he bought the tenement house and they had six
children in seven and a half years. The youngest, Lillian, was but 10
months old when John Banaian died of pneumonia.
Nana was left with three boys and three girls; the oldest, my mother,
was 10. It was in the middle of the Depression. My mother became the
daytime mother while Nana went to work in the mills.
After World War II, my mother - who went by `Kay' rather than the
decidedly immigrant first name she was given, Kouharig - met and
married a local Irishman, Thomas Christie. I was born in 1948, the
first grandchild on my mother's side.
AN ANTIDOTE TO HARDSHIP
The lives of my mother and her mother - my Nana - were forged from
hardship and loss.
When I came along life was a little better. The American economy was
strong after the war: Dad, a World War II veteran, became a skilled
machinist; Mom worked the late shift at a nearby GE plant.
There were no luxuries, but my extended, deprived family made my life
as easy, as all-American, as they could. Perhaps in response to their
lives, mine was to be protected.
I was to be the antidote to their past, yet the family history seeped
into my consciousness, awaiting a deeper exploration of the past
opened up by Nana's recording.
Now, it takes but a plate of grape leaves I make from Nana's recipe,
and I can see her running through those mulberry trees while her
father - my great-grandfather - grabs his rifle and runs directly into
his murder. In that moment he enters the history of a people, the
history of a world soon afire, the history of one of mankind's worst
inventions: genocide.
On the recording, Nana, who died five years later at age 96, strays
from the narrative of her life to reflect upon history and the fact
that the Turkish government to this day officially denies the Armenian
Genocide:
`I don't know if the Turks would ever. But, ah, they're denying
it. I'm sorry to damn them - they don't want to admit it. I'm telling
you this: Where did I come from? Where did I get the story to tell you
about it?'
John Christie is a journalist living in Maine and writing a memoir,
`The Regretful Boy Scout.'