KRICORIAN: A CANDLE IN DARK TIMES
by Nancy Kricorian
December 19, 2012
While doing research on the uses of political violence by “non-state
actors” for my second novel Dreams of Bread and Fire, I came across a
1984 French documentary entitled “Terrorists in Retirement” (original
title “Des terroristes a la retraite”). It told the story of a French
Communist Resistance network made up of immigrant workers. The
network’s leader was an Armenian poet named Missak Manouchian. In
late 1943, the Germans arrested Manouchian and 22 members of his
group, which was comprised of Eastern European Jews, Armenians, and
Italian and Spanish refugees. The men were executed by firing squad
in February 1944. The sole woman was executed by beheading in Germany
some months later.
The cover of Kricorian’s new novel.
After reading a little more about Missak Manouchian, an Armenian
Genocide survivor who immigrated to France in 1925 when he was 19 years
old, I realized even as I was writing my second novel that I had found
the time period and milieu for my next book. How did the Armenian
community of Paris live the four years of the Nazi occupation? What
had it felt like for genocide survivors who had rebuilt their lives
in France to look out the window on German troops marching down the
Rue de Belleville? My third novel, All the Light There Was, grew out
of these questions.
Early in the writing process, I conceived of the characters in the
novel. The protagonist and narrator would be Maral Pegorian, who was
born in 1926. Her father was a cobbler and her mother was a seamstress
who did piecework at home. (Henri Verneuil’s film “Mayrig” and an
unpublished memoir by Varoujan Barsamian inspired this last detail.)
Both of the parents were orphans and genocide survivors who had met
at Camp Oddo in Marseille. They shared their Paris apartment with
their two children and the mother’s younger sister. And from there
I imagined the rest-the neighbors, the schoolmates, the local police
officer, the Armenian grocer, and the young men Maral would love.
After I had read through an enormous stack of books-historical studies,
memoirs, novels, and collections of letters-about what the French
called Les Annees Noires (The Dark Years), I planned a research trip
to Paris. I wanted to walk the streets of Belleville, the neighborhood
where the Pegorians lived. I wanted to visit the Lycee Victor Hugo
where Maral was a student. Most importantly, I wanted to talk with
Armenians who had lived through the Occupation.
While I was in Paris, my friend Hagop Papazian volunteered to be my
“fixer.” He located an Armenian woman who was seven years old when
the German troops had marched down the Rue de Belleville. She told me
how her family had briefly hidden one of her schoolmates whose family
had been arrested during the infamous Vel d’Hiv roundup of Jews in
July 1942. Hagop and I went to visit a nonagenarian named Nazaret
Peshdikian who had been an amateur actor in the Armenian community
theater and a member of the Hunchak resistance. He repeated several
times the story of an Allied bomb that had gone astray in his Paris
neighborhood, upending a rabbit hutch and killing his wife. He told
us for a fourth time, almost in wonder, “My wife was dead, but all
the rabbits were still alive.”
A few days later when I was at an Armenian street demonstration near
the statue of Komitas close to the Seine, another friend introduced
me to historian Anahid Der Minassian. After I informed her about
my research project, she told me that when she was a blonde-haired,
blue-eyed little girl, her father had trotted her around to the offices
of various German officials as living proof that the Armenians were an
“Aryan” people.
Later in the week Hagop arranged a meeting with Arsène Tchakarian, one
of the last surviving members of the Manouchian Groupe. Tchakarian has
devoted his life to documenting the work and the lives of his friend
Missak Manouchian and other members of his Resistance network. He is
also interested in the roles that different Armenian political groups
played with regard to the Nazis during the war. Among the objects he
showed me was a photograph of a few members of the Dashnak party in
Vienna standing in front of an Armenian tricolor that had been sewn
to a Nazi flag.
The day before I was to depart for home, a friend of Hagop’s was
finally able to secure a meeting with a man who added another facet
to what I learned about the variety of Armenian experiences in France
during the Occupation. The story this man told me about his time in the
Soviet Army and subsequently in the German Wehrmacht gave me a context
for an anecdote I had come across in Charles Aznavour’s autobiography.
Aznavour, the son of Armenian immigrants, was born Shahnour Vaghinag
Aznavourian in Paris in 1924. His autobiography and his sister Aida
Aznavour-Garvarentz’s memoir briefly covered the war years, during
which Charles and Aida were aspiring young entertainers. Their parents,
who were Communists, were part of a circle of friends and political
activists that included Missak Manouchian and his wife Melinee.
Late in the Occupation, some Soviet Armenians appeared in Paris in
German uniform. They were Soviet soldiers who had been captured on the
battlefield and then held in P.O.W. camps in Poland under terrible
conditions. They were pressed into the German Army, choosing the
Wehrmacht over probable starvation. The Germans didn’t trust them on
the Eastern Front, so they were sent to France to work on the Atlantic
wall. When these Armenians were given leave, they often came to Paris
where the local community held cultural evenings to welcome them.
The Aznavourian family’s contribution to the Resistance was inviting
these soldiers to their home and trying to convince them to desert the
German Army. If they agreed, the Aznavours would give them civilian
clothes and help them to go underground. Charles Aznavour, 19 at the
time, was responsible for the nighttime task of dumping the deserters’
boots and uniforms into the sewers of Paris.
In writing All the Light There Was, I wasn’t interested in outsized
heroism; I was interested in small defiant acts that make dignity and
integrity possible in the face of a brutal occupation. It was a time
when there was very little light, literally because of blackouts and
shortages, and figuratively because of the repression and violence that
accompanied collaborationist and Nazi rule. The title of the novel
comes from a line in Jean Anouilh’s play “The Lark” (“L’Alouette”),
in which he dramatizes the trial of Joan of Arc.
Before the judges, Joan describes the first two times she heard
God’s voice.
“The moon was rising; it shone on the white sheep; and that was all
the light there was. And then came the second time; the bells were
ringing for the noonday Angelus. The light came again, in bright
sunlight, but brighter than the sun, and that time I saw him.”*
The first time, it was just his voice under ordinary moonlight; the
second time it was his voice accompanied by a luminous, holy vision. I
am drawn to the ordinary light-the moonlight and the small flames that
people create for themselves in a dark time. But I am also fascinated
by the compromises and lies that are sometimes required of even the
most principled people faced with the confrontation between systemic
political violence and the desire to survive. These are the themes
that I tried to explore in All the Light There Was.
My editor recently pointed out that my three novels-Zabelle, Dreams
of Bread and Fire, and All the Light There Was-viewed together are a
portrait of Armenians in the diaspora after the genocide. They are the
stories of the survivors, their children, and their grandchildren. My
fourth novel, for which I made a first research trip to Beirut this
past summer, will be about Armenians of Lebanon who immigrate to New
York during the Civil War, adding another dimension to my collage
portrait of the diaspora. What interests me here is how the Armenians,
like birds whose nests are destroyed repeatedly by storm, continue
to rebuild their homes and their communities again and again. It’s
a sad story, but ultimately, it is about resilience and hope. I feel
that my work as a writer is to bear witness to trauma, to celebrate
resilience, and to amplify what is humane in the human.
* Jean Anouilh, The Lark, translated by Christopher Fry, Oxford
University Press, 1956, p. 3
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/12/19/kricorian-a-candle-in-dark-times/