Jerusalem Post
May 11 2005
Other people’s genocide
By LARRY DERFNER
Beatrice Kaplanian in Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter. No hard feelings.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski
Photo: A 100-year-old survivor of the Armenian expulsion from Turkey
recalls the horrors she survived
Among Beatrice Kaplanian’s sharpest memories from the death march of
1915 is thirst. “We would cry for water,” she says. She remembers
seeing her father die. “He was so weak. We covered him and they took
him to the valley. They didn’t bury him, they just left him there
with the others.” She saw a lot of Armenians on the march die from
thirst and fatigue. “Somebody would faint, and he wouldn’t get up.”
Sitting outside in her gray-brick, 17th-century rooftop apartment in
Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter, Kaplanian, whose memories of the
killings put her age at roughly 100, is Israel’s last living survivor
of the Armenian genocide. Between 1 million and 1.5 million Armenian
civilians were killed in 1915-16 by the troops and mobs of the
Turkish Ottoman Empire, mainly on forced marches from Turkey to
Syria. Another 500,000 to one million Armenians survived and became
permanent refugees.
The journey featured widespread rape, as well as mass murders by
burning, drowning, axing and beating with blunt instruments – this
last “to save shell and powder,” in the words of then-US ambassador
to Turkey Henry Morgenthau. In this way, live ammunition was saved
for the Ottoman armies fighting World War I.
Countless other Armenians died of epidemics in the gigantic
concentration camps set up along the route.
Kaplanian is small and somewhat bent over and her hands tremble, but
she’s remarkably mobile and alert and still has a headful of thick,
straight, blondish-white hair. She moves plastic chairs and a
clothesline out of the way for the interview, and poses according to
the photographer’s requests.
Translating my questions into her native Turkish is George Hintlian,
Israel’s leading Armenian historian, a lifelong resident of the
Armenian Quarter who “discovered” Kaplanian only a few years ago.
Born Filomena before being renamed Beatrice by her British adoptive
parents, she is one of some 800 survivors he says he has interviewed.
The living memory of the genocide is “like a sinking ship, and you
have to salvage whatever you can,” says Hintlian, 58.
As a little girl in her mountain village, Filomena and her sister
Christina used to play with the Turkish neighbors’ girls. Then one
day the town crier went from house to house among the Armenians
telling them that they would all have to leave the next day. Neither
the two girls, their older brother or their parents understood what
was going on, the old woman says.
They took cheese and bread, threw a mattress and saddle over their
donkey – a relative luxury on the march, only for the well-to-do –
and the two sisters sat in the saddle while the rest of the family
walked. They weren’t told their destination, but they were being led
to Aleppo, Syria, some 700 km. away.
One night one of the “escorts” on the march – who were often violent
criminals released by the Ottomans especially for this murderous duty
– snatched one of the pretty Armenian girls in an instant. “We heard
her shriek,” recalls Kaplanian, and the girl was not seen again.
Twice the old woman cried in the interview. The first time was while
recalling how she and her sister refused their mother’s request to
sit in the saddle for a few hours to rest her feet, telling her that
their feet hurt too. The second time was when Kaplanian remembered
how a Turkish official took her back to Turkey to be his and his
wife’s daughter; she never saw or heard from her family after that.
The postwar British occupation of Turkey removed Filomena from the
Turkish couple’s home, bringing her to a British orphanage in Beirut,
where she was adopted and later brought to Jerusalem. There she
married a shoemaker from her family’s village named Kaplanian who
died some 20 years ago, and they had a son who is now in late-middle
age.
A devout Christian whose only book at home is the Bible, she says she
has “no hard feelings” toward the Turks – or the Kurds, Circassians
or Chechens, who also took part in the slaughter – over what happened
90 years ago. “They are human beings too,” she says. “My heart is at
peace.” Based on what he knows of other survivors, Hintlian says
Kaplanian’s longevity is tied to her extraordinarily forgiving
attitude. “The survivors who were filled with hatred usually didn’t
live long lives,” he says.
We met at Jaffa Gate as it was filled with Jews coming for the Pessah
birkat hakohanim, or “priestly blessing.” In the adjacent Armenian
Quarter walls were pasted with posters for the 90th anniversary of
the Armenian genocide.
As with millions of Armenians above a certain age, Hintlian grew up
on family memories of the genocide. His father was on the death
march, and he would tell stories about how his father was axed to
death, and how his baby brother died from acute diarrhea a few days
after their despairing mother, unable to still the boy’s endless
cries for water that they didn’t have, gave him muddy water from the
ground to drink.
By contrast, the stories Hintlian heard from his mother taught him
“that there were good Turks, too,” he says. The mayor of his mother’s
village in Turkey, a man named Jellal, who had already been removed
by the Ottomans from his post as governor of Aleppo for refusing to
cooperate in the genocide, refused again as mayor of the village,
costing him that position, too. Jellal won the village’s Armenians
crucial months to prepare for their eventual expulsion, says
Hintlian.
“None of my mother’s family died on the march,” he says. “They were
wealthy, they traveled in a carriage, and they bribed escorts and
officials along the way.” Many of the Armenian survivors owed their
lives to such bribery, he notes, while others were aided by
sympathetic Turks and Kurds, and still others, like his father,
survived by resourcefulness and simple “Darwinian” stamina.
His father eventually came to Jerusalem to work as an assistant to
the Armenian Patriarch, and George later followed him in the post,
which he held for 25 years. During that time he became a historian,
publishing eight books on 19th-century Jerusalem and the 1,500-year
history of the city’s Armenians.
He decided to research the Armenian genocide at age 19 after hearing
a lecture by the pioneer historian of that cataclysm, Vahakn Dadrian,
an Armenian-American.
Yet despite having interviewed hundreds of survivors, both local
residents and foreigners coming on pilgrimage, and even though he has
pored over accounts of the genocide left by American, German,
Austrian and Scandinavian officials in Turkey at the time, Hintlian
says he has not written a book on the subject and has no plans to do
so.
“When Dadrian used to come to the library in the Patriarchate to do
research, we had to remind him to eat lunch, he just became so
overwhelmed by the cruelty of the stories,” says Hintlian, sitting in
an Armenian cafe for tourists at Jaffa Gate.
“Sometimes I go to Yad Vashem and I see scholars coming out looking
depressed. I don’t think I have the nerves and willpower to live in
that world. It’s a hell,” he says. “I can read only one week at a
time (about the Armenian genocide), then I want to stop. I’m not
suited for this work.” Still, he is drawn to the old people he
interviews. “I start off asking them about their blood pressure,
their simple human needs. Once they feel you care, they’ll tell you
anything,” he says with a gentle smile.
“But sometimes I’m very worried about interviewing them,” he
continues. Hintlian fears that he may have actually brought on the
deaths of three aged interviewees by leading them to recount their
childhood memories from the death march. “Three people died very soon
after I interviewed them. One died four hours after, another two days
after,” he says.
He is in touch with Israeli writers who’ve taken a deep interest in
the Armenian genocide, above all Yehuda Bauer, the dean of Holocaust
historians in this country. Others include novelists Amos Oz and Haim
Guri, politicians Yossi Sarid and Yossi Beilin, broadcast journalist
Ya’acov Ahimeir and historians Amos Elon, Tom Segev and Yair Oron.
Another reason Hintlian doesn’t want to write a book about the
Armenian genocide is because of the gaps in its history left by
Turkey’s refusal to open its archives from that period. “German
archives from the Holocaust have been opened to Jewish researchers,
but the Turkish archives from the genocide are either closed or
they’ve been purged,” he says. “So we are in the dark about so many
details – who [among Ottoman officials] made a particular decision,
and when. We have to grope our way and try to make sense of it.”
Ultimately, though, Hintlian says he cannot make sense of the
Armenian genocide, and this is yet another reason why he feels unable
to write a book about it. He is baffled as to how people could carry
out an atrocity of such magnitude. “It’s an endless mystery,” he
says.
It’s also a mystery to Beatrice Kaplanian, but she doesn’t dwell on
it. Putting her balcony chairs away, she is asked how the God she
worships could allow such evil. “It is a sin to interfere in the ways
of God,” she replies. “Whatever God wills to happen, happens.”
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