Their families’ stories keep Armenia alive
Armenian-Americans in Rhode Island will mark the anniversary of the
1915 genocide with a candlelight march, a night of music and stories,
and a youth day.
01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, April 17, 2005
BY ELIZABETH GUDRAIS
Journal Staff Writer
Atrocities. Great misfortune. Tragic events. To Armenians, they are
nothing more than euphemisms.
“Every time somebody denies that the genocide happened, it’s like
perpetrating the crime against the victims all over again,” says
Pauline Getzoyan, a Lincoln resident helping to organize the 90th
anniversary commemoration of the 1915 Armenian genocide.
Armenians remember their collective grief each April 24, with bigger
commemorations on 10-year anniversaries. This year will probably be
the last 10-year marker that includes firsthand survivors’ stories.
Getzoyan’s grandmother, Margaret DerManuelian, is already gone. She
died in 2002. So Getzoyan will tell her story. At the commemoration on
Saturday, Getzoyan will don her grandmother’s shawl, take up her
black-veined turquoise worry beads, and tell a story so horrific her
grandmother didn’t speak of it for years.
Getzoyan will recount how in 1915, DerManuelian, then a 6-year-old
living in the Ottoman sanjak, or district, of Palu, discovered her
father’s dead body, decapitated by Ottoman soldiers.
Next weekend’s events are about remembering, but they’re also about
getting recognition. Getzoyan, who is 43 and teaches fourth grade at
Central Elementary in Lincoln, co-organized a symposium at Rhode
Island College in March, to guide teachers in adding genocide
education to their curriculum. She is part of the Armenian National
Committee, which lobbies Congress and the president to recognize that
the word genocide applies to the Armenian killings of 1915. An
estimated 1.5 million Armenians perished at Ottoman hands.
Some countries, including France, Switzerland and Greece, have
officially recognized the Ottoman killing of Armenians in 1915 as
genocide. Turkey and the United States are not among those countries.
ARMENIANS REMEMBER April 24, 1915, as the day the genocide started. On
that day, more than 200 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders
were killed in Constantinople.
This year, April 24 falls on a Sunday. Many of Rhode Island’s
estimated 10,000 Armenian-Americans will go to New York City for
commemoration events in Times Square. Providence will have its own
event, at the North Burial Ground on North Main Street, at a monument
with the skull of an unidentified 12-year-old Armenian boy sealed
inside.
The skull, recovered from the Der-el-Zor desert in what is now Syria,
may seem a morbid symbol. But that’s the point. Ninety years later,
the genocide “still has the power to shock us,” says Adam Strom, a
scholar who will speak at the ceremony.
Strom, the principal writer and editor of Crimes Against Humanity and
Civilization: The Genocide of the Armenians, a resource book for
teachers, is on staff at Facing History and Ourselves, a Brookline,
Mass.-based organization that creates teaching aids and provides
guidance on “questions of tolerance and social responsibility,” in
Strom’s words.
Strom believes recognizing the Armenian genocide is crucial to help
Armenians and to prevent future atrocities.
Acknowledgement is the first step in learning history’s lessons, he
says.
“How can you approach history so it doesn’t become a weapon in a new
war?” Strom says. “So often, history becomes a call for revenge.”
GREGORY CHOPOORIAN’S grandfather struggled with that very question.
His grandfather survived being forcibly marched through the Der-el-Zor
desert. What haunted him most, he would later tell his family, was the
sight of a man forced to watch his pregnant wife impaled on a
stake. Chopoorian, 42, of Cumberland, said his grandfather “would,
toward the end of his life, say, ‘What are we going to do? We can’t do
the same thing to them. We’ll be just like them.’ ”
Chopoorian, who works as an administrator at the Mansion Nursing Home
in Central Falls, has published articles on Armenian costumes, rugs
and material culture. As a consultant for Ararat, a 2002 film by
Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan, Chopoorian worked with the set
designer and costume designer to ensure accuracy.
For Saturday’s commemoration evening at Rhode Island College,
Chopoorian will narrate vignettes about the six provinces of historic
Armenia.
The borders of the modern Armenian state, a former Soviet republic,
were established by the USSR. While small, Armenia is larger than
Israel and Lebanon combined. But the area Armenians claim as their
historic homeland extends some 300 miles west from Mount Ararat into
modern-day Turkey.
The 16,854-foot peak was the landing site of Noah’s Ark, according to
the Christian tradition Armenians hold dear.
It grates on Armenians that Mount Ararat itself is in eastern Turkey,
close enough to the border to be visible from Armenia.
“Our sacred mountain has been stolen from us,” Chopoorian says,
holding up a calendar photo of Ararat looming white against a vivid
blue sky.
An exchange from Ararat, the movie, encapsulates the way the debate
plays out between modern-day Turks and Armenians.
“Lots of people died. It was World War I,” Elias Koteas’ character, an
actor with Turkish ancestry, tells Raffi, a young Armenian-American
man struggling to understand his heritage.
“Turkey wasn’t at war with Armenia,” Raffi replies, “just like Germany
wasn’t at war with the Jews.” Armenians “were Turkish citizens,” he
continues. “They had a right to protection.”
The film is about the Armenian genocide, but also about how we tell
history, and how each retelling is necessarily imperfect because it’s
based on one person’s understanding.
The Turkish minister of culture called the film “propaganda” and
accused Egoyan of distorting history. Miramax chairman Harvey
Weinstein, determined to distribute the film in the U.S., accused the
Turkish government of “denying history.”
A particularly venomous thread of discussion on one movie Web site
centers on an oft-quoted statement attributed to Adolf Hitler on the
eve of invading Poland: “Be merciless in exterminating Polish men,
women and children. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation
of the Armenians?”
Turks and their defenders dispute that Hitler ever said this.
Three years after Ararat’s release, postings still fly back and forth
on the Internet.
Armenians don’t hate Turks, Chopoorian insists. They understand the
Turkish government’s objection to connecting modern-day Turkey with
the deeds of the Ottoman Empire. They just want recognition.
“How can you destroy an entire nation of people and not deal with it?”
he asks.
It’s imperative that Armenians act while there are still survivors,
says Joyce Yeremian, chairwoman of the Armenian Martyrs’ Memorial
Committee of Rhode Island, which planned the commemoration events.
Once the survivors are gone, “it’s just history,” says Yeremian, 64, a
North Providence resident whose grandfather, 14 years old in 1915,
survived an attempt by Ottoman forces to drown him in the Euphrates.
NEW ENGLAND’S earliest Armenian immigrant community sprang up in
Worcester in the 1890s, when Armenians fled the persecution of Sultan
Abdul-Hamid II. They came to work in the mills and sent money home.
In 1915, many served as sponsors for relatives still in
Armenia. Providence’s Armenians settled on Smith Hill. St. Sahag &
St. Mesrob Armenian Apostolic Church was the community’s
centerpiece. Two more Armenian churches, Sts. Vartanantz on Broadway
and Euphrates Evangelical on Franklin Street, followed.
Today, the state’s 10,000 or so Armenian-Americans have spread out,
with enclaves in Cranston and North Providence. St. Sahag & St. Mesrob
“is no longer a community church,” says its pastor, the Rev. Simeon
Odabashian. “Everybody drives here. Nobody walks.”
But with its eight-sided tower, blue neon-lit cross and Armenian flag
— striped red, blue and orange — visible from Route 95, St. Sahag &
St. Mesrob is still a gathering place for Rhode Island’s Armenians.
Inside, the greeting parev, Armenian for hello, echoes as people
arrive for a meeting to plan commemoration events.
The events begin Tuesday, with Armenian Youth Day at the Egavian
Cultural Center, adjacent to St. Sahag & St. Mesrob Church at 70
Jefferson St. The 10th annual youth day will feature Armenian crafts
and cooking classes, and a chance to meet survivors of the genocide.
On Friday at 7, a candlelight march is planned from Sts. Vartanantz
Church, 402 Broadway, to the State House.
Saturday evening’s event at Rhode Island College’s Roberts Hall starts
at 7 and is free and open to the public. The Rhode Island Philharmonic
Youth Orchestra will play the music of composer Aram Khatchaturian.
Pauline Getzoyan will perform her Vignette of an Armenian
Mother. Gregory Chopoorian will tell about the six provinces,
accompanied by David Ayriyan on the kemancha, a traditional string
instrument. Armenian and English poems and a performance by the
Armenian Chorale of Rhode Island, directed by St. Sahag & St. Mesrob
Church music director Konstantin Petrossian, will round out the
evening.
The next afternoon, at 12:30 at the North Burial Ground, a civil
ceremony will include Adam Strom’s speech.
THERE IS a chilling sameness about the Armenians’ stories of genocide.
Men closed in churches and burned to death. Girls who ended up in
orphanages, or working as servants for Turkish families. Babies thrown
into the Tigris and the Euphrates rather than have them grabbed by
Ottoman soldiers.
Armenians will gather next weekend for the memory of Pauline
Getzoyan’s grandmother, and Joyce Yeremian’s grandfather, and Gregory
Chopoorian’s grandfather, and hundreds of thousands more who didn’t
survive.