Los Angeles Daily News
May 9 2005
Effort gathers memories of mass killings in Turkey
Nauksh Boghossian
LOS ANGELES – Samuel Kadorian shakes his head in frustration,
sheepishly shrugs his shoulders and mutters “old age, old age,” when
he can’t remember the maiden name of his beloved wife, Mary.
But sitting in his Sherman Oaks apartment, the 98-year-old vividly
recalls a horrific memory from 1915, when he was just 8, and
Armenians were rounded up in Turkey: A baby wouldn’t stop crying, he
said, so one Turkish soldier threw the infant up into the air and
another caught the child on his bayonet.
Those memories will never be erased, said Kadorian, one of the last
survivors of what is known as the Armenian Genocide – the organized
killing of 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey beginning in 1915.
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“I can’t take it out,” said the frail man, pointing to his head. “I
may forgive them, but forget – never, never, never.”
For nearly 40 years, UCLA professor Richard Hovannisian has overseen
a project – the largest oral history project in the Armenian
community – to interview survivors and record stories like
Kadorian’s.
Students in his 10-week Oral History course have interviewed 10
survivors, recording their memories on audio cassette tapes.
Just before the 90th anniversary this year of the mass killings,
commemorated on April 24, the 72-year-old professor reached a
landmark: He digitized all 800 interviews conducted by his students
over the last four decades.
Of the hundreds of people his students interviewed, Hovannisian
believes no more than 25 are still alive.
“This is an important contribution to the preservation of history and
the understanding of what occurred to the Armenian people under the
cover of World War I,” he said. “It’s important especially in view of
denial of genocide by the Turkish government. Fortunately, some
Turkish scholars are now challenging the state, insisting there was
ethnic cleansing.”
The Turkish government maintains there was no organized, systematic
killing of Armenians, arguing that those slain were casualties of
war.
Recent communication between the prime minister of Turkey and the
president of Armenia have opened the door to dialogue between the two
governments in an effort to improve relations and begin researching
historical archives.
“Has Professor Hovannisian interviewed families or descendants of any
of the Turkish or Muslim families killed by Armenians?” said Engin
Ansay, consul general of Turkey in Los Angeles. “But I don’t want to
engage in a game of one-upmanship. That is not my intent.
“I strongly believe a dialogue is essential and also an understanding
between Armenian Diasporans and Turkish-Americans.”
Life’s work
The project has been a large part of Hovannisian’s life’s work. The
shelves in his office are stacked with books on genocide and there
are boxes and boxes of cassettes, organized alphabetically —
“Seropian-Stepanian,” “Kizikian-Mandroian.”
“It all started when we realized the last generation of Armenians
born in the historic homeland is fast disappearing and taking with
them invaluable information,” he said.
In addition to providing a historical record of the atrocities, the
interviews have sociological value, offering a glimpse into Armenian
life, customs and rituals prior to 1915.
“They have a very idyllic and romanticized collective memory of life
before the calamity. In relative terms they think back on their
childhood of a protective extended family and excitement getting
prepared for holidays,” Hovannisian said. “By comparison, life
(before the killings) was great.”
The stories, while each unique, collectively reveal common truths,
Hovannisian said.
Families were very quickly separated from the fathers, who were
killed immediately. Women and children were put on death marches
through the deserts of Syria.
For every survivor there was a story of a Turk or a Muslim who tried
to intervene. And when people 400 miles apart have the same stories,
it helps show it was an organized, premeditated operation against the
Armenian people in the Turkish empire.
Students are now transcribing and translating the interviews in an
expensive and time-consuming process. The ultimate goal is to
collaborate with others who have video interviews of survivors
throughout the world and to make them all available for research and
to the public via mediums like the Internet.
Compared with the Shoah Foundation, which since 1994 has compiled
120,000 hours of video on 52,000 Holocaust survivors in 56 countries
and in 32 languages, Hovannisian said their efforts are “amateurish”
mainly due to a lack of financial resources.
The Shoah Foundation’s work has cost about $100 million — $40
million of which was provided by director Steven Spielberg, said
Douglas Greenberg, president and CEO of the foundation.
Priceless work
Hovannisian’s work is invaluable both in honoring the generation that
suffered and in supporting scholarship and research on the subject,
Greenberg said.
“Anything is better than nothing. The challenge is for us to work
together because the problem is not an Armenian problem or a Jewish
problem or a Cambodian problem. It’s a human problem,” he said.
“The day is going to come where there will be no survivors alive from
any genocide and once they’re gone, their memory of the experience
will leave with them if not for these interviews.”
Kadorian’s father was shot by the Turks and his two younger sisters
and brother died of starvation. His mother survived and Kadorian
lived because he hid under a pile of bodies, and forced himself not
to cry so the Turks would not find him.
The atrocities he experienced at such a young age has taught him a
simple lesson — be nice to people and treat them with respect.
“They say you should say these stories so such things don’t happen
again. But I’m sorry to say, things like killing, dying, it’s going
to continue until doomsday,” he said.
“Why, why can’t people get along with each other and be nice to each
other? We don’t learn and when something like this happens, we say
that’s them, the heck with them.
“But if it’s them today, tomorrow it’ll be us.”