Winnipeg Free Press, Canada
June 9 2013
The last of the Armenian genocide survivors
By: Chris Bohjalian
A woman I met last month in southwestern Turkey is going to die,
probably sometime soon. Asiya’s death will not be covered by any news
service, and for all but a few people in her small village of
Chunkush, she will not be missed. Even the relatives who love her will
probably think to themselves, well, she was 98 years old. Or 99. Or,
if she survives until 2015, somewhere in the neighbourhood of a
century. She will have lived a long life.
When I met Asiya in May, her daughter brought me strong Kurdish tea
and fresh strawberries from their yard, and when I return to her
village someday and find that she has indeed passed away, I suspect
I’m going to weep.
Why cry for a woman I met but once, who lived a long life and who
couldn’t understand a word I said? Who spoke only Turkish, a language
in which I know how to say only “please” and “thank you”?
Because Asiya is what some people call a hidden Armenian, and she is
the last surviving Armenian in Chunkush.
Imet her when I was traveling with six Armenian American friends
through a part of Turkey that many Armenians (including me) refer to
as Historic Armenia. We were in a region that today is largely Kurdish
but as recently as 98 years ago was a mixture of Kurds, Turks,
Assyrians and Armenians. We were making a pilgrimage to view the ruins
of Armenian churches and monasteries, the remnants of a culture
obliterated from this corner of the Earth in the Armenian genocide.
During the First World War, 1.5 million Armenians were systematically
annihilated – three out of every four living in the Ottoman Empire.
On our fifth day, we visited Chunkush, where until 1915 there was a
thriving community of 10,000 Armenians. The ruins of the church loom
over you. The town was almost entirely Armenian. Over a few
nightmarish days that summer, Turkish gendarmes and Kurdish chetes –
killing parties – descended on the village and marched almost every
Armenian two hours away to a ravine called Dudan, where they shot,
bayoneted or simply threw them into a chasm of several hundred feet.
One of the gendarmes pulled Asiya’s mother from the line at the edge
of the ravine, however, because he thought she was pretty. He decided
he’d marry her. And so she was spared – one of the very few Armenians
who were saved that summer day in 1915.
My companions and I hadn’t expected to find Asiya when we journeyed to
Chunkush. We simply wanted to see the ruins of the church. Most of the
villagers acknowledged that once upon a time Armenians had lived in
Chunkush, but they were quick to add – whenever we asked what had
happened to them – that at some point they had all “moved away.”
The truth was, they were still there, whatever remained of their bones
deteriorating at the bottom of the Dudan chasm. We didn’t think there
were any living Armenians in the town.
But as we were leaving, a thin fellow in his 60s, with a deeply
weathered face and a ball cap, raced up to our van and banged on the
door. We had been there an hour, and word had spread that Americans
were in town. We had to meet his mother-in-law, he said.
Our Kurdish driver worried that this was the beginning of a nasty
international incident: Seven Americans kidnapped or killed. But the
fellow was desperate, so we agreed to come meet Asiya. My friend
Khatchig Mouradian, editor of the Armenian Weekly in the United
States, speaks Turkish and translated.
I have met survivors of the Armenian genocide before, including my
grandparents. But meeting Asiya was different. She wasn’t in
Washington or Paris or Beirut. She wasn’t a part of the Armenian
diaspora, where we usually find the few remaining survivors of the
genocide. Here was someone whose mother had been at the edge of the
gorge – and who was still living where, more than likely, her
grandparents and her father had been executed. Where her ancestral
culture had been exterminated.
After the massacre, the town of 10,000 Armenians was reinvented as a
town of 10,000 Kurds. Here was someone whose mother had heard the
endless gunshots. The crash of the bodies on the rocks. The wails of
the children.
She and her mother had grown up and grown old, aware of who and what
they were – Armenian – but forced to conform and remain silent. That
was the price of survival in the days after the genocide, and it’s a
custom that, in small villages such as Chunkush, endures today. That
is, perhaps, the very definition of a hidden Armenian.
Whenever we asked Asiya about being Armenian, she would shake her head
ruefully and grow silent. One time her daughter chimed in: “No. We
can’t talk about that.”
Whenever we asked what her mother had told her of the chasm, she would
look down and murmur: “I was too young. I don’t remember.” Sometimes
she would begin a sentence, “My mother said…” but then her voice
would trail off.
At one of those moments when she paused, I took her hand. It was a
reflex, and I had no idea if this was a cultural faux pas. But she
wrapped my fingers in hers; her grip was powerful. She looked at me
from beneath her headdress with eyes that were at once among the
saddest and the strongest I’ve ever seen. I understood instantly why
her son-in-law, a very good man, wanted us to meet her: It was because
she wanted to meet us. She wanted to meet other Armenians.
Today there are but a handful of living survivors of the Armenian
genocide. When the centennial arrives in 2015, there will be fewer
still. I hope that Asiya will be with us, because I plan to return to
Chunkush that year. No one from the village is going to commemorate
the 10,000 who died in that chasm, so it will be up to people like me
to make that effort – and, yes, to embrace the Asiyas of the world who
were there.
Chris Bohjalian is the author of 16 books. His new novel, The Light in
the Ruins, comes out on July 9.
– The Washington Post
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/The-last-of-the-Armenian-genocide-survivors-210613011.html