DID THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE HAVE ITS OWN PRIMO LEVI?
By Adam Kirsch

Nextbook.org
March 30 2009

A week before Germany’s invasion of Poland, Hitler reportedly urged his
generals to slaughter civilians–Slavs and Jews, the two most hated
groups in Nazi ideology–without mercy. "After all," he flippantly
asked, "who remembers the Armenians?" In fact, the attempted genocide
of the Armenians by the Turks during the First World War was very well
documented, at the time and ever since. Henry Morgenthau, the American
ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the massacres, wrote at length
in his memoirs about this attempt to wipe an entire population off
the face of the earth. The word genocide had not yet been coined,
but that is clearly what happened in Armenia between 1915 and 1918;
in fact, Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish activist who coined the
term, had the Armenian example in mind.

Yet it is true that the Armenian genocide has not entered into
America’s common cultural memory in the same way as the Nazi
Holocaust. In part that is because it took place in the Ottoman
Empire, from which few Americans come, rather than in Europe, where
many Americans have their roots; in part it is because the U.S. never
fought the Ottomans in World War I, as it did the Germans in World
War II; in part it is because of the greater prominence of Jews than
Armenians in American life. And sadly, it is also due to the continuing
refusal of the Turkish government to acknowledge the crimes of its
predecessor state, thus creating an illusion of controversy about a
history that no historians doubt. (When the Turkish Nobel laureate
Orhan Pamuk spoke publicly about the Armenian genocide, he was charged
with the crime of "insulting Turkishness" and forced to flee abroad.)

In 2007, the Anti-Defamation League was rightly embroiled in scandal
when it supported the Turkish government’s plea to the U.S. Congress
not to officially recognize the Armenian genocide. (After much
controversy, the director of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, tempered his
stance.) For, as many writers urged at the time, it is surely incumbent
upon Jews, above all, to remember the Armenians, whose oblivion Hitler
counted on.

That is why the publication of Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the
Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 is especially noteworthy for Jewish
readers. In this eyewitness account of the genocide, written in 1918
and now translated into English for the first time, Grigoris Balakian
offers an Armenian equivalent to the testimonies of Holocaust survivors
like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Balakian, a priest of the Armenian
Apostolic Church, was deported from Constantinople in April 1915, along
with a large group of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders. For
the next three years, until Turkey’s defeat and surrender in September
1918, Balakian lived constantly under the shadow of death. Exiled, sent
on forced marches, threatened by bandits and government officials,
starved and sick, he managed to survive only by a combination of
luck, daring, the corruption and inefficiency of Turkish officials,
and the support of righteous non-Armenians who hid and fed him.

As Balakian, along with his fellow deportees, was sent from place
to place, he witnessed and heard about the unbelievable horrors
inflicted on the Armenians of Turkey. The Ottoman state was far less
powerful and organized than the Nazis’ would be; it did not have
the resources to build gas chambers, or even the railways to bring
people to them. The mechanics of mass murder, then, were primitive and
face-to-face. Armenian deportees were attacked by mobs and groups of
bandits armed with axes and farm tools, much as in the Hutu massacre
of Tutsis in Rwanda. Balakian records many scenes of Armenians being
tortured, mutilated, and decapitated, of babies torn apart by soldiers,
of women raped dozens of times until they died; he shows us fields
of decomposing corpses and hills of bones and skulls. Most of those
who survived these organized attacks succumbed to starvation and
illness. In total, an estimated 1.2 million Armenians died.

The enmity between Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks was of long
standing, dating back to the Middle Ages, when Turkish invaders had
conquered the ancient kingdom of Armenia in Asia Minor. By the 20th
century, most of the other Christian subject populations of the Ottoman
Empire–in Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and Serbia–had broken free of
the sultan’s rule. The Armenians, however, lived in the heartland of
Turkey, and were deeply integrated into the region’s economy. Rather
like the Jews of Poland, they served as merchants and craftsmen to
the mainly rural Muslim population; also like the Jews, they attracted
envy and hatred. In one terribly ironic passage, Balakian notes that
"German officers [stationed in Turkey] would often speak of us as
Christian Jews and blood-sucking usurers of the Turkish people."

One signal difference between the Jewish and the Armenian cases,
however, is that the Armenians had a comparatively recent history
of sovereignty, and strong hopes for regaining an independent
Armenian state. Many Armenians lived across the border in Russia, the
Christian power that was historically the greatest foe of the Ottoman
Empire. When the First World War broke out, the Russian Armenians and
some Turkish Armenian rebels took up arms against Turkey. This offered
the pretext for the Ottoman government to undertake a "final solution"
to the Armenian problem, by annihilating the entire population, men,
women, and children. (And it was a pretext: as Balakian notes, the
vast majority of Turkish Armenians were totally uninvolved in the war.)

Balakian writes that he was already worried about the intentions of the
Turks before the war started, and tried to alert his superiors in the
Church. But "no one gave any credence to the possibility of such a huge
political plan, because in human history from prehistoric times, there
had never been a forced displacement of an entire nationality. But
as we will unfortunately see, that which had seemed impossible to
everyone at that time, and even became a subject of derision, became
possible during the world war, as did a litany of other tragic and
criminal events." Like Hitler during the Second World War, the Turkish
government used the First World War to cover and justify a scale of
killing that was unimaginable in ordinary times.

Readers familiar with the literature of the Holocaust will
read Armenian Golgotha with a combination of recognition and
estrangement. Many of the events Balakian writes about could be taking
place in Poland or the Ukraine 20 years later. Again and again,
we hear about how Turkish policemen would tell the residents of a
village to assemble for a long journey, herd people into carriages,
then drive them to a remote spot, where they would be murdered and
their possessions divided up among the murderers. Armenians were told
that they were simply being relocated to the Syrian desert province
of Der Zor, just as Jews were told that they were being resettled
in the East; the name of Der Zor takes on, in Balakian’s account,
the same aura of nightmare and death that "the East" did for Jewish
victims. Balakian even wonders, as have some Jewish observers of
the Holocaust, why more of the victims did not fight back. "They had
the psychology of a herd of dumb sheep, going to their death without
complaint," he complains about one group of deportees who failed to
seize the chance to flee.

Yet as the title of Armenian Golgotha suggests, Balakian’s story has
a unique religious and political context. Victims of the Holocaust
were often brought to question the existence of God, and even the
possibility of meaning and order in the universe. Primo Levi famously
wrote about Auschwitz as a place where "there is no why." But Balakian
viewed even the worst trials of his people as a prelude to the rebirth
of an independent Armenia–a crucifixion that would be followed by
resurrection. In one astonishing passage, he remembers how he and some
fellow Armenians, meeting secretly during the war, "got so excited that
we started to draw the borders of tomorrow’s liberated Armenia on a map
. . . and calculate the number of surviving Armenians." This national
faith went hand in hand with Balakian’s unbroken Christian faith: "But
no matter, for hadn’t Christ suffered? Hadn’t he been tortured? Wasn’t
he betrayed because he preached justice in this world, while perhaps
justice could only be celestial and eternal, not worldly?"

Moments like these make clear that even genocide did not destroy
Balakian’s faith or his belief in his nation’s future. He was, after
all, a senior clergyman in the Armenian Church, and throughout his
wanderings, he was treated by other Armenians as a leader. He writes
movingly of the burdens of that role–having to remain rational and
inspirational when he, too, was hungry and afraid. Yet without his
sense of vocation, Balakian would doubtless never have survived to
write this terrible, necessary book. "Like many who were going to die,"
he recalls about one man he encountered, "the late Hamamjian often
asked me to chronicle this tragic story of the Armenian Golgotha. And
with this account, I think I have executed the will of those who are
no more."

Adam Kirsch is the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a new biography in
Nextbook’s Jewish Encounters series.