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A thread on #ArmenianGenocide Memorial Day, and what it means to be descended from genocide survivors. Many, many people could write a thread like this, but this one is mine.
My great-grandfather and great-grandmother each lost practically their entire families in the genocide. They were children.
This is me with them, circa 1984.
This is me with them, circa 1984.
Paravon, my great-grandfather, witnessed his entire family murdered while he hid in a tree. For the rest of his life, he suffered what we’d now call PTSD. He’s remembered both for being incredibly loving, and for being taciturn and having a sharp temper.
He never spoke about his family.
When he was in a nursing home, the staff restrained him with a straight jacket, because his nightmares of the Turks coming to kill him were so violent.
Mariam, my great-grandmother, was very young when she lost her family. She remembered having older twin siblings, but not their names. She spent the rest of her life trying to find them.
At every Armenian gathering, she would seek out people who came from the same region, and ask if they’d known a family with twins. She never found any answers.
Let me refer to @hugorifkind: “These people are gone, eradicated, flushed down the memory hole. Reduced, at best, to scraps and half-remembered fragments. In the space of a lifetime. So, you remember what you can, and as loudly as you can.”
My grandfather grew up without aunts, uncles, cousins or any extended family to speak of, except for the one great uncle who managed to get Paravon and Mariam into Canada in 1920.
Canada wasn’t accepting refugees then, especially not ‘Asiatic’ ones. They got in on a family visa.
As an adult, I visited my extended family to learn Paravon and Mariam’s stories. No one could remember the name of the villages they were from. Ask your aunt, ask your cousin, they’ll know, they said. But no one knew, no one had written it down.
One of the first time I mentioned the genocide outside of my family was to a group of colleagues over lunch. One of them slammed her hand down on the table and said, “But NOTHING was as bad as what happened to the Jews!”
At that time, I didn’t know enough to say, “It was the same thing. It was the same thing that happened to the Jews.”
No, there weren’t gas chambers. But there were caves. Caves stuffed full of Armenian women and children, the entrances blocked, so they could be asphyxiated with fire smoke.
There were concentration camps in the Syrian desert. There was propaganda portraying Armenians as dangerous bacteria. There were cattle cars stuffed full of “deportees” on the newly built train lines.
There was a group of men in government, who, under cover of war, made calculated plans to eradicate undesirable segments of their civilian population, and carried out those plans.
There were German officers who witnessed these events, as they were allied w/ the Ottoman Empire (which became Turkey) during WWI.
And there were courts-martials, precedents to the Nuremberg trials, that found mountains of evidence and convicted dozens of government officials.
And there were courts-martials, precedents to the Nuremberg trials, that found mountains of evidence and convicted dozens of government officials.
The Holocaust has cultural weight in Western society. Mention Holocaust denial, and people with no Jewish ancestry will get riled up.
And that is good and right and just. It should be the same way for the Armenian genocide. But the Turkish government denies it ever happened.
And that is good and right and just. It should be the same way for the Armenian genocide. But the Turkish government denies it ever happened.
That’s the key difference between the Armenian genocide of WWI and the Holocaust of WWII. Imagine for a minute if Germany had denied the Holocaust. If they continued to deny it.
I’ve been researching and discussing the Armenian genocide for 10 years. A lot of people I meet in my daily life in Canada and Australia haven’t heard of it, or don’t know anything about it.
When people do know about it, it’s often because they’ve had an Armenian friend or colleague who told them about it.
This is what it means to be a descendent of Armenian genocide survivors, a century later. You carry it under your skin. You make sure people know, one person at a time.
Even when it feels like it’s receding too far, too fast into the past.
Even when it feels like it’s receding too far, too fast into the past.
At dinner parties and other gatherings, when asked what I do, I often mention the genocide. One night my husband took me aside. “You shouldn’t go on too long – you don’t want to bore people.”
But I’m not the one pushing the topic. When people hear how similar the genocide is to the Holocaust, they struggle to understand why they know so much about one and nothing about the other. This is the power of Turkey’s century of denial.
This is remembering as loudly as I can.
This thread was inspired by @hugorifkind. Read his original thread here:
Thank you to all the incredible people who have been sharing this today; it is heartening.
