AUTHOR TELLS OF FEAR AND COURAGE DURING ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
By Ruth Solomon, rsolomon@pioneerlocal.com

Wilmette Life
7134,wi-ahnert-091808-s1.article
Sept 18 2008
IL

Author Margaret Ajemian Ahnert is familiar with fear and courage, a
lesson she learned from her late mother, Ester. As a teenager, Ester
survived the Armenian genocide in the years during and immediately
after World War I in what was then called the Ottoman Empire but is
now Turkey.

Ahnert, who relates Ester’s story in the recently published book,
The Knock at the Door (2007, Beaufort Books), has been touring the
nation non-stop during the last year to talk about her book. The
author appeared Sept. 8 at Winnetka’s Book Stall at Chestnut Court,
811 Elm St. Margaret Ajemian Ahnert, author of The Knock at the Door

"The book is very impressive; she has a real story to tell. She is
an excellent writer, the book moves along," said Roberta Rubin, who
invited Ahnert to the Book Stall after hearing her speak last year
at the Women’s Athletic Club in downtown Chicago.

Ahnert said she wrote the 204-page book as a way to pass her mother’s
stories on to her grandchildren, now 16 and 17, stories she had heard
repeatedly told exactly the same way. The book started as a master’s
thesis, which Ahnert earned in 1999 from Goucher College. It received
the New York Book Fair Award as Best Historical Memoir of 2008,
and plans are in the works to publish it in other languages.

Ahnert said she also hoped the book would allow her to work through
complicated feelings she has about the horrors of what happened and
her identity as someone of Armenian heritage. "You think you’re over
it, and you’re not. I want to be rid of it," Ahnert said.

In the memoir, Ester, who was adopted at age 5 after being orphaned,
tells her daughter about growing up in a rural village, Amasia, about
100 miles south of the Black Sea where Muslim Turks and Christian
Armenians got along well. But in May 1915, Ester, then 15, noticed
a change in the attitude of the adults around her, who were talking
ominously of hangings and leaving before it was too late. But in
June, Turkish soldiers came to Amasia and ordered all the Armenians
to leave. The day after the soldiers arrived, Ester saw the body of
a woman she knew, her abdomen, still swollen from pregnancy, had been
cut open, her unborn baby stuck on a sword next to her. Leaving town,
Ester witnessed pits with naked dead bodies of young and elderly men.

On the march, Turkish soldiers attacked the exiting Armenians, charging
into the crowd on horses swinging swords. Ester saw girls being carted
away. Rape was common, and Ester’s grandmother tried to make her look
unattractive by scratching her face and rubbing garlic in the creases.

One by one, starting with her young brother, Ester became separated
from all the members of her family. She never saw them again.