FAMILY HISTORY RECORDS LOCAL MAN’S ESCAPE FROM GENOCIDE
By Steve Arney
Bloomington Pantagraph, Illinois
June 19 2007
BLOOMINGTON — To record his father’s life, George Churukian of
Bloomington led a family effort to fill a volume with pictures and
accomplishments.
But he couldn’t leave it there. Churukian, a retired Illinois Wesleyan
professor, felt it necessary to delve into the human tragedy witnessed
by his father, his mother and their people, the Armenians.
A weathered red notebook contains the scribbling of Giragos Churukian,
a physician known as Doc throughout Paris, a town east of Decatur
where he practiced medicine for more than five decades.
Now typed, edited and self-published, the contents tell of hardship
that defined Doc Churukian’s early life.
In doctor’s scribble, Giragos (gee-RAH-gos) wrote, "We begged them
to let us rest, drink water, and eat something — of no use. Old and
weak ones could not tolerate the trip and they were left behind. My
grandmother, Martha, was left behind and we never saw or heard of
her anymore. She just died or was killed and perhaps buried next to
the road."
They were in what is today part of Syria. In those days, it was
Anatolia, within the Turkish-ruled Ottoman Empire, and the Armenian
population was being cleansed. The Turkish government acknowledges
trouble in those parts in the 1910s; it denies genocide occurred.
But Armenians were targeted, placed on death marches through the
desert and often massacred in groups, according to historians. The word
"genocide" isn’t avoided among academics, and the U.S.
government estimates 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered and
forcefully exiled.
A recount of horrors is an awkward introduction for a life story of
a man who became a prominent small-town Illinois citizen.
Said his son, George: "The major value, I think, is so that future
generations know what happened, where we came from, what his life
was like and partially what my mother’s life was like."
George, his wife Carol and their three daughters moved to Bloomington
in 1976 for George’s job at Illinois Wesleyan University. Carol,
too, is a first generation Armenian-American and all five are in
education-related occupations.
George was an education professor at Illinois Wesleyan until retiring
in 1993; he was department chairman from 1979 to 1990. Carol is
a music teacher, a church organist and music accompanist. Their
daughters are Ann, Martha and Alice.
George’s mother, Helen Churukian, also was an Armenian immigrant. She
died in 1987. Giragos lived until 1994, to the age of 97.
The parents talked little of their early lives. "He always talked
short on important details," Carol said. "He talked about how he
managed to escape."
"Usually, it was just a snippet," George added.
Other relatives have been less forthcoming. George once talked to one
of his mother’s cousins about the olden days. "Then I said, ‘Well,
what happened in 1915?’ You never heard subject closed so fast and
subject changed so rapidly."
The cousin was 12 at the time of the genocide. Carol wonders what
the girl, now elderly, endured.
Some Armenians — and certainly the government of Turkey — might
have preferred the Churukians skip the first 37 pages in assembling
Doc’s life story, which they self-published this year.
It starts with the 1926 photo of the young, handsome Giragos,
photographed with a rifle in hand taking a break from a hunt. Giragos
returned to school in Tarsus in 1919 and then transferred to American
University of Beirut.
Moving on to Sudan, Doc practiced medicine for two years in land
under Egyptian and British influence. In a photo of the doctor on the
Nile River, he looks happy. American entrepreneur George Eastman was
entertaining the doctor and other guests on Eastman’s yacht.
Moving to America, there was sympathy for the Armenians and ample
relatives and immigrants. Giragos met his future wife, Helen, in the
United States, and he settled here and married. The family moved to
Illinois in 1940 when Doc got a job at Paris Hospital.
Move on
"We are moving on, but it’s helpful to know about the past," George
said.
In the years before Doc’s death, daughter Miriam – George’s sister,
known as Betty — was instrumental in persuading her father to record
an account of his life.
Starting in 1989 at age 93, Giragos provided the first pages. The
early chapters explore two waves of repression.
The genocide of the Armenians generally is dated to 1914 or 1915,
in the early days of World War I, until the end of the war. The
Churukian family dates the start to 1909.
Giragos’ family and most of those in the city of Kessab fled an
attack by Turkish soldiers, Giragos recorded. With the overthrow of
the Sultan the same year, the citizens returned to their pillaged
village, its Christian Protestant church in ashes, and resettled.
A removal under soldier escort occurred in late 1914, he wrote. The
family, nearing starvation, was given work mining salt in a city
called Djaboul, according to Giragos’ pages. The family befriended
Arabs who warned them of a rebel attack in autumn 1918, enabling the
family to escape to Aleppo.
The war ended on Nov. 11, 1918.
"The following day," the doctor wrote, "we packed what we had and hired
a couple of mules and headed toward Kessab, our ancestral home, which
ended our life of suffering, starving and our struggle to keep alive."
George’s sister died in 2001, but George and brother Peter,
from Decatur, persisted in the project. They kept their father’s
first-person voice throughout most of it, and supplemented the text
with sidebar stories.
It is not a book that George expects will have interest in the
general public. That’s OK. The 200 copies do the intended job of
preserving. Its title comes from the better years, and it speaks to
Doc Churukian’s insistence upon career and personal fulfillment.
It was his favorite saying: "Never Settle for Second Best."
————————————- ——————————————-
Excer pts from the family history
"The weather was hot in the daytime and chilly at night. I met two
men who were part of the group of undertakers who buried the dead.
They told me that every day they buried 100-150 people in one place.
They would open the big tent early in the morning to pick up 30 to
40 dead, who had frozen during the night."
* * * * *
"One day government officials came to the tent area and told us we
would be transported further south towards Deir ez Zor. I noticed
that my father grabbed some of our belongings, two pillows wrapped
in a blanket, and put it on a horse-driven carriage (there were eight
to 10 carriages.) An officer saw him doing that and asked him to take
them back.
He said, ‘Those carriages are for women and children. You can walk.’
(My older brother and I were with my father.) ‘You have two grown-up
boys — you walk.’ (We were 22 and 20 years old respectively.) We
returned to our tent and my father started to cry. My mother comforted
us and said, ‘This is God’s will – let us not lose our faith.’ All of
us bent our heads and got on our knees and asked God to save us. ‘His
will be done.’ And God did save us."
* * * * *
"In some cases women and children were loaded into small boats and
taken south along the river. Children were drowned and women were
taken to Turk-Arab Harems. We learned about this a year later when
a woman taken to an Arab home escaped and told us the sad story.
Unbelievable, but true."
Giragos Churukian’s writings on the Armenian genocide
06/18/values/doc4676e73aacc57002570219.txt