ARMENIAN GENOCIDE REMEMBERED
By Lisa D. Welsh

Worcester Telegram
NEWS/804210600/1008/NEWS02
April 21 2008
MA

Importance of repeating stories stressed

Photo: During the Martyrs’ Day commemoration at the Armenian Church of
Our Saviour yesterday, 7-year-old Emilee Derkazarian of Holden lights
a candle in memory of her relative Charles Derkazarian, who was killed
during the Armenian genocide.

Photo: Heghine Minassian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, pauses
as she relates her experiences.

WORCESTER– Three generations of Armenians — a 99-year-old woman, a
three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a high school essayist
— spoke from differing perspectives but shared one message during
the 93rd anniversary of the Armenian genocide recognition yesterday
at the Armenian Church of Our Saviour: "Honor the truth of the past
because denial makes it more likely that genocide will happen again."

Heghine Minassian was 6 years old the day Turkish soldiers went house
to house and emptied all the buildings in her village. She said most
Armenians were marched into the desert, where they were left to starve
to death; but some of the women, like her aunt, were kept as slaves.

"My grandparents were in the attic hiding," Mrs. Minassian said in
Armenian through an English interpreter, Van Aroian. "My grandmother’s
sister yelled, ‘Don’t open the door. Don’t go out.’ But the (soldiers)
gave the order to come down and they came down."

Within three years, Mrs. Minassian would be an orphan, the same age of
many of the children in church who participated in a candle-lighting
ceremony in honor of their family members who had died in the
genocide. Looking out at the young faces in the front pews,
Mrs. Minassian said, "Don’t forget our struggle."

Stephen A. Kurkjian, a reporter for the Boston Globe for 38 years,
has written about many high-profile events. However, sharing the
story of his father’s family was not one of them.

"I was not an appreciating Armenian until 1992, when I accompanied my
83-year-old father to the village where he was born," Mr. Kurkjian
said at the Martyrs’ Day commemoration. "The sadness hit me like a
sledgehammer. I started asking, ‘How could this happen?’ "

"I came back and wrote an article called ‘Roots of Sorrow.’ But now
I’d add to that title, ‘Seeds of Hope.’ "

Mr. Kurkjian’s father lost his father, brother and sister in the
genocide of 1915; he survived after making the 300-mile trek to Syria
with his mother, and later to America.

"My father would say out of tragedy there was opportunity for liberty
and religious freedom. There was education and economic opportunity
in America. I would have never had the successes I’ve had. Instead
I would have worked at a small weekly in a mountain village."

"I asked my Der Hayr (priest), ‘How this could happen?’ " Mr. Kurkjian
said. "He said, ‘God would not have allowed the first Christian
church to not have survived.’ That’s as good an answer as you are
going to get."

With the internal awakening about his heritage, Mr. Kurkjian has
traveled to Turkey and watched pressure build on the Turkish government
to reassess its position that downplays references to the genocide.

Robin Garabedian, a junior at Doherty Memorial High School whose
family has been with the Armenian Church of Our Saviour since her
grandmother’s family immigrated to Worcester, said she was 7 years
old when her father told her about the genocide. In reading her
award-winning essay, "Why Remembrance of the Genocide is Important,"
she quoted Adolf Hitler as saying, "Who today remembers the
extermination of the Armenians?" as rationalization for the Holocaust.

"How does someone hate someone else so much?" Robin asked in
anger. "If the world had stood up (against) the Armenian genocide,
there wouldn’t have been genocide of the Jews, or in Cambodia in the
’70s, or in Darfur today."

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress