No genocide should be forgotten
By Max Boudakian
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, NY
April 22 2005
(April 22, 2005) – The citation in the story “Month of Misfortune”
(April 18) – “April is the cruelest month” – from T.S. Eliot’s
poem The Waste Land could be applied to another cruel event that
began April 24, 1915. On that day, nearly 250 Christian Armenian
intellectuals and cultural leaders in Constantinople (now Istanbul)
were arrested, deported or killed by the Ottoman Turks, the dominant
Muslim group in Turkey at that time. The following ensued in 1915-1923:
1.5 million Armenians perished; 500,000 survivors were exiled; and,
a 3,000-year-old Armenian presence was wiped out.
However, the world soon forgot about the Armenians. Twenty years
later, on Aug. 22, 1939, Adolph Hitler cynically remarked at
Obersalzburg: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of
the Armenians?” That is why the Armenian genocide is often referred
to as the “forgotten genocide.” Hitler thought that he could carry
out the Jewish Holocaust with impunity.
The last Armenian genocide survivor in Rochester was my mother,
Gadarine Boudakian, who died in 2000 at age 94. Let me share
some personal experiences about her. In April 1915, the family of
Garabed Topjian, his wife, Haiganoush, and their three children (Leo,
Gadarine and Mariam) were ordered deported. However, before they left
the country, her parents died. At age 9, she buried them. She also
lost her siblings. We also know that Gadarine later paired with two
other orphan girls. To survive, they ate grass and cut their hair
to disguise their gender and avoid being raped. Gadarine’s odyssey
led her to the American orphanage and hospital in Konya, Turkey. My
mother was remarkable. She never expressed bitterness toward those
who had destroyed her family and childhood.
In a precedent-setting statement in early 2005, the U.S. ambassador
to Armenia, John Evans, referred to these atrocities as “the first
genocide of the 20th century.” The Armenian genocide, the Jewish
Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge and the “killing fields” of Cambodia,
and, the Rwandan genocide: What a waste of human life! Now in the
21st century, the Darfur region of the Sudan heads the new list of
genocides. Will this madness ever end?
Boudakian, of Pittsford, is corresponding secretary, Armenian Church
of Rochester.