This newspaper told Vartenie Dadian’s story in 2000. She was 94 at the time. Rob Golub, later managing editor of The Journal Times, told her story.
When she was a preteen, Mrs. Dadian said, soldiers took the Armenian men away from the village of Tomarza, Turkey, including Mrs. Dadian’s father. She never saw him again.
Perhaps days or weeks later, she said, “somebody came in the morning and said ‘This house has to be empty in an hour or two.’ “ Her mother gathered up bread, and they joined the walk.
“Turks, they take everything and they let us walk,” Dadian said. “We left everything … I lost my family. I lost my mother.” Dadian’s mother died on the walk, after mother and daughter somehow became separated.
The Armenian refugees walked from Turkey to the Syrian desert. Dadian was placed in a British orphanage. She was brought to the United States by the man who became her husband.
In Golub’s telling of Dadian’s story, he quoted her eldest daughter, Akgulian, regarding being awed by her mother’s story. Akgulian said: “I think all of us feel very special, that we are existing because of her.”
Golub’s report was published on April 24, 2000; that night, people of Armenian ancestry around the world held their annual remembrance of the Armenian genocide, when 1.5 million Armenians were systematically killed by the soldiers and government of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
Five years and four days after we told Vartenie Dadian’s story, we published a letter to the editor from Zohrab Khaligian, a Racinian and a member of the Armenian National Committee of Wisconsin.
“It was deeply insulting to read the article ‘Some Turks confront World War I massacre of Armenians’ on April 17th because it continues The Journal Times’ policy of publishing articles that deny the Armenian genocide,” he wrote, adding that in a 2004 Associated Press report we published, “the Armenian genocide is referred to as an Armenian allegation with statements like ‘Armenians say.’ “
Citing a bill adopted by both houses of the Wisconsin Legislature and a proclamation by then-Gov. James Doyle in 2005 that designated April 24 as “Wisconsin Day of Remembrance for the Armenian Genocide of 1915 to 1923,” he wrote: “Isn’t it enough … for The Journal Times to also characterize the Armenian genocide as genocide?”
Mr. Khaligian was right, and we knew it. So we published his letter with an editor’s note: “It is not Journal Times policy to deny historical fact, as the Armenian genocide clearly is. Stories in The Journal Times will reflect this policy.”
From that point forward, whenever The Journal Times published an Associated Press report regarding the matter, we inserted the following sentence: “The Journal Times recognizes the Armenian genocide as historical fact.”
Why did we do this?
For our neighbors.
Racine doesn’t make the City-Data.com list of the 101 U.S. cities with the largest number of people born in Armenia. But all the proof you need of the sizable Armenian-American community in Racine is the presence of two Armenian Apostolic churches — St. Hagop, 4100 Newman Road, and St. Mesrob, 4605 Erie St.
In a city where so many survivors of the genocide had settled and raised families, we could no longer refuse to stand with our Armenian-American neighbors.
“Too many people get the wrong idea, why we remember,” the Rev. Yeprem Kelegian of St. Mesrob, himself the son of survivors of the genocide, said in 2000. Forgetting he said, “becomes mental and moral sloth.” Kelegian said a tendency toward hate and genocide always exists, and without memory, “you allow those tendencies to creep back in.”
But four presidents, two Republicans and two Democrats, failed to acknowledge historical reality in the 21 years after we told Mrs. Dadian’s story. Finally, on April 24, President Joe Biden acknowledged it.
“The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today,” Biden said in a statement. “We affirm the history. We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated.”
We’re thankful that President Biden took a stand and formally recognized the Armenian genocide.
We wish, for the sake of our neighbors, that it hadn’t taken from Woodrow Wilson onward for an American head of state to do so.