With tensions mounting between the U.S. and Russia over Syria’s apparent use of chemical weapons, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchison, is calling for a “stop to genocide.”
Her words hit especially home this week at West Valley College in Saratoga, where the annual Global Citizenship Conference focused on “The Faces of Genocide.”
The faces include Araxia Jebejian. “She died during the Armenian Genocide,” a distant relative, Nora Balabanian, said.
Araxia Jebejian’s biography says she was an educated woman who was deported from her hometown in Turkey in 1915 and, along with 250,000 other Armenians, sent to a city named Der Zor. A year later, the governor of Der Zor wanted to marry her, but she refused, so he tortured and then executed her.
Balabanian, who lives in San Jose and is active in the South Bay’s Armenian community, thinks Jebejian was her grandmother’s first cousin. Jebejian was just one of approximately 1.5 million Armenians killed in the genocide that lasted from 1915-1917.
“My mother’s aunt was also murdered,” Balabanian said. “My grandmother survived the genocide, but she was scared to talk about it,”
Balabanian and other Armenians say it’s important that they talk about it — especially now.
“We want people to know because it’s being repeated in the Middle East today — it’s the same thing,” she said. “So, our hope is to help people make a connection to genocide.”
For West Valley Planetarium Director Benjamin Mendelsohn, who was part of “Children of the Survivors” panel, the conference was deeply personal. His father’s family was hidden by a Polish farmer during the war and survived, but his maternal grandmother was “rounded up by German soldiers, shot and pushed into a mass grave,” Mendelsohn said.
Mendelsohn’s mother forbade his father from talking about the Holocaust at home. Even so, he picked up bits and pieces here and there, and eventually traveled to Poland where he met descendants of the “righteous person who saved my family.”
Ironically, San Jose State President Mary Papazian — the granddaughter of Armenian survivors — sees a direct correlation between the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide.
“The junior German officers who were in Turkey during the Armenian Genocide were senior German officers in World War II,” said Papazian, who took part in the survivors’ panel. “We’ve always felt a connection to German Holocaust victims.”
A “new history” was written in the 1920s denying the Armenian Genocide ever happened, Papazian said, and that history continues. She recalled being a student at UCLA in 1980 and said the Turkish consulate called university officials to have an Armenian Genocide exhibit removed from campus.
Papazian says the distant years mean her children have had very little exposure to genocide survivors. “What they come to now is pride in their history and ensuring we show people respect as we go toward the future. This is the kind of education we need to continue to do.”
West Valley student body President Mikela Lazari, who is Assyrian, plans to continue educating people by becoming an attorney. Her goal is to work for the International Court of Justice.
Lazari was born in Iran and came to the U.S. in 2009, when she was 11 years old.
“I’m a religious refugee,” Lazari said. “The experience of being a minority and being unwelcome in my home country, Iran, has made me an activist for social and political change. I want to bring some relief to groups around the world that don’t have a voice.”