Armenian among those marking sad anniversary
THE RECORD (Bergen County, NJ)
Friday, April 15, 2005
By CATHERINE HOLAHAN, STAFF WRITER ([email protected])
ORADELL – Ninety years later, Rahan Kachian still has the nightmares.
In the daylight, she is healthy and happy. The horrors of her youth in
Turkey are memories.
But at night, she is five years old again. Burying the remains of her
beheaded father in the family vineyard. Running. Watching strangers burn
churches filled with people. Hiding between mattresses.
Seeing her 2-year-old brother, Kourken, die of starvation.
“I was 5 years old but I remember,” said Kachian, 94, of Oradell. “I
remember.”
It’s a history Kachian and fellow survivors of the 1915 Armenian
massacre are trying to bring to light. The Turkish government denies the
killings were state-sponsored genocide.
On April 24, Armenians will gather in New York to mark the 90th
anniversary of the Turkish government’s arrest of more than 200 Armenian
community leaders. That date is considered the beginning of a genocide
that took the lives of more than 1 million Armenians in three years.
There will be services held at three New York cathedrals and a
remembrance in Times Square on that day.
“The genocide is a current issue,” said Ken Sarajian, a relative through
marriage of Kachian and an organizer of the New York events. “It’s about
justice, it’s about the prevention of genocide and what happened in
Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur. The threat of genocide still exists
in the world today.”
For Kachian, the genocide is current because the memories are still so
fresh.
“How could they deny it when they killed everybody?” she asks.
Kachian’s earliest memories go back to age 3, when she lived with her
father, sister and brother on a plantation in the village of Segham. Her
mother died in childbirth.
The family had vineyards, a large farm, a lake and animals. Her father,
Mardiros Delerian, was a university professor and also sold the excess
produce from the farm in the city.
“It was beautiful,” Kachian said. “We had everything we could want.”
Then, one morning, that all changed.
Turkish soldiers came to her village and began shooting her neighbors.
Kachian, her elder sister Marinos, and her brother hid. Kachian’s father
ran to woods behind the house where he was found, shot and beheaded.
Though Kachian did not know it at the time, the Turkish government had
ordered the deportation of Armenians to the Der El Zor desert, according
to Western history books. The deportations are thought, by some
scholars, to have been spurred by an Armenian movement for an
independent state.
Kachian believes the Turkish government wanted to seize the land of the
Armenians to increase its wealth.
When Turkish soldiers came, Kachian and her siblings fled to a Turkish
friend’s house in a nearby city. An aunt later made it to the same
friend’s house after being shot and left for dead by the soldiers.
Soon after their arrival, their family friend died and her sister forced
the Armenians to work the land for free in exchange for a place to hide.
At 5, Kachian had to tend the lambs and sheep. If she lost one, she was
beaten, she said. She and her siblings were given crusts of bread to
eat. Her brother eventually starved to death.
Kachian survived by eating wild vegetables as she tended the flocks.
Eventually, after the killings stopped, she escaped with her sister to
an orphanage. Her sister was married to an Armenian who had become a
U.S. citizen and soldier. He sent money to bring his wife to the United
States. The pair brought Kachian to New York to live with them when she
was about 17.
“When I came to the U.S., I wasn’t afraid to walk down the street,”
Kachian said.
She also wasn’t afraid to tell others what she remembered of the
genocide. But even now, she sometimes wakes up frightened, from the
memories.
PHOTO CAPTION: BY DANIELLE P. RICHARDS / Rahan Kachian, 94, is haunted
by painful memories of the 1915 Armenian massacre in Turkey.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress