AUTHOR PETER BALAKIAN DISCUSSES NEW WORK ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE WITH OCEANA SOPHOMORES
Jean Bartlett

Pacifica Tribune
13037
May 21 2009
CA

Oceana High School is very much about teaching students social
responsibility.

Through course work which involves studies of genocide and human rights
issues and the consequences of indifference, through participation
in community activism projects and by experiencing living history
lessons through the words of "eyewitness" speakers — each teenager
is given the tools to understand the significance of their voice in
their community, in their nation and in their world.

Tuesday afternoon Oceana Frosh/Soph Humanities teachers Karen
Lichtenberg and Jennifer McEnany along with Jack Weinstein, San
Francisco Bay Area Region Director of Facing History and Ourselves,
welcomed celebrated American-Armenian poet, writer and academic Peter
Balakian, an expert on the Armenian Genocide, to Oceana High School’s
Little Theatre. He spoke to the sophomores.

Balakian is a professor of humanities at Colgate University;
Lichtenberg’s alma mater. He has authored eight books including his
memoir, "Black Dog of Fate," winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize
for memoir and a New York Times Notable Book.

"Black Dog of Fate" chronicles Balakian’s gradual awareness that he
is a descendent of Armenian genocide survivors.

The recipient of many prestigious awards including the Movses
Khorenatsi Medal, one of Armenia’s highest civilian honors for
contributions in the field of culture, arts, literature, education,
and humanities, Balakian told students he did not come to lecture
on an event but rather to introduce a newly published memoir of the
Armenian Genocide that is a dramatic eyewitness account of the first
modern genocide.

The book was originally published in Armenian in 1922. Prior to its
very recent translation and subsequent publication in English, the
book only existed in small editions, read by Armenian scholars and
clergy. Balakian only came to know about this book in 1991, when a
friend sent him a commemorative article from a French magazine which
honored his great, great uncle Grigoris Balakian.

Born in 1876, Grigoris died in Marseilles in 1934. He was bishop of the
Armenian Apostolic Church in southern France . All this, his great,
great nephew knew. However, Peter did not know and learned through
the article, that Grigoris Balakian had written a 71-chapter memoir
called "Armenian Gogatha" and that Grigoris was a first-hand witness
to the Armenian genocide.

Why didn’t Balakian know this about his uncle, one student
asked. Balakian, who grew up in a suburban, affluent all-American
kind of family, explained: "People don’t like to talk about painful
things. Traumatic stuff is often swept under the rug and sometimes
families are really defined by secrets."

In 1992, Balakian asked a friend to translate the table of contents
of his uncle’s book into English and when she did so, Peter said he
was blown away and knew the entire memoir had to be translated.

"I felt the responsibility of bringing a big piece of news to a wider
audience," said Balakian.

Published by Knopf on April 2, the 560-page "Armenian Golgotha" –
A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918, by Grigoris Balakian
(author), Peter Balakian (translator) and Aris Sevag (translator),
is already garnering high critical acclaim.

"My uncle was one of the famous 250 Constantinople Armenian
intellectual and cultural leaders arrested on the night of April 24,
1915," said Balakian. This was the start of the Ottoman Turkish
government’s systematic attempt to eliminate the Armenian people
from Turkey.

"On that night in April, the Turkish government began the genocide
process by gathering up the writers, journalists, clergy, cultural
leaders (wealthy individuals who supported the arts) and teachers —
so that these individuals would be stopped from using their resources
to get the message out, to resist." These early victims were taken
to a prison 200 miles into the interior of Turkey and then onto a
100-mile death march into the very dense mountains of central and
southern Turkey.

Balakian’s uncle, also a published author, was a high ranking
celibate priest. Over the next four years, Grigoris Balakian would
bear witness to horrendous slaughter, to mass atrocities. Because
he was a clergyman, survivors would seek him out to tell him what
they had witnessed. Perpetrators of the genocide crimes would also
talk to Balakian because he was a priest and because they presumed
he would be dead before he could tell others what they told him. In
addition "neutral" bystanders, often German, Swiss and Austrian
railway engineers — would tell Grigoris Balakian about atrocities
they had witnessed.

"My uncle had a special role in Armenian society as a leader and as
an intellectual, and he was a very impressive individual who tried to
save the lives of 100 bedraggled famine-ravished deportees that he lead
from northern Turkey down to southern Turkey," said Balakian. "You
are going to find him as a very tortured, anguished priest because
he is witnessing the destruction of the flock of his race and his
own role as a clergyman plays a part in how the story is told."

When asked, an Oceana student explained that Golgotha means "place
of the skull" and it is the biblical name for where Jesus was
crucified. It is also known as Calgary.

"My uncle saw the Armenian story, as a story of crucifixion and
martyrdom," said Balakian.

Balakian said this book is an, "Incredible panorama of a destruction
of the Armenian civilization, a 2500 year-old civilization on its own
historic homeland — that is being destroyed by the Ottoman Turkish
government as my great uncle walks on a death march through city
after city, town after town."

The book examines cultural destruction. Armenian churches, books,
libraries, paintings, schools — anything that was an achievement to
their civilization was destroyed. The cultural destruction included the
loss of their religious identity. Held at knifepoint, many Armenians
were told to convert to Islam or die.

Impossibly, Grigoris would escape, disguised as a railroad worker
and then later as a German soldier.

Professor Balakian and Oceana Sophomores discussed their knowledge of
Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and author of 36 works dealing with
Judaism, the Holocaust and the "moral responsibility of all people
to fight hatred, racism and genocide."

It was pointed out that Hitler used the Armenian Genocide as a
"template" for the Holocaust for in it he saw that there was a way
a nation could exterminate a targeted group of people. In August of
1939 Hitler said, "Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation
of the Armenians?"

Oceana sophomores asked many questions. Did the government of Turkey
today fully acknowledge the Armenian Genocide? (No.) Will the book be
published in Turkey ? (Yes, eventually by human rights activist and
brave Turkish publisher Ragip Zarakolu.) Who is Rafal Lemkin? (The
Holocaust survivor who coined the term "genocide.")

Several Oceana students pointed out that by questioning the past and
critiquing the past and dealing with the past, an educated and caring
society will resist repeating the mistakes of the past.

Balakian was given a boom of applause, and as the clock signified the
end of the school day, many sophomores formed a line to question the
visiting professor.