Boston Globe, MA
April 21 2005
Bringing order to survivors’ memories
Armenians gather stories of genocide
By Lauren K. Meade, Globe Correspondent
At night, they listened to stifled weeping and murmured secrets
through their bedroom walls.
By day, they were greeted with smiles — a facade that belied a
horrific past.
For the children of Armenian immigrants who survived the genocide of
1915 to 1922, assembling a picture of their parents’ suffering was
like piecing together a shredded diary. They collected fragments from
history classes and overheard conversations.
“Armenian parents never talk about genocide in front of their
children,” said Varoujan Froundjian, curator of the Armenian Oral
History Archive at Columbia University. “It was always a mystery in
the minds of young people.”
Froundjian addressed an audience at the Armenian Library and Museum
of America in Watertown during a panel discussion about keeping alive
the memory of the massacres of 1.5 million Armenians, launched 90
years ago by the Ottoman Turks.
For three decades, the children of the survivors have been recording
oral histories of their parents’ experiences. Much of Sunday’s
discussion centered on how to preserve the deteriorating tapes and
make them accessible to the public through an online database.
Bethel Bilezikian Charkoudian, 65, of Newton, is championing this
project in Massachusetts. In the ’70s, Charkoudian collaborated with
the Armenian Library to record 600 hours of interviews with survivors
about the genocide and the immigration waves that followed.
She has donated copies of the tapes to Columbia, where Froundjian is
synthesizing personal experiences with the documented historical
data. While oral histories may lack precision, they provide an
emotional intensity that brings the facts to life.
The Armenian Library’s project is similar to Froundjian’s.
Charkoudian is recruiting volunteers to index the tapes for names,
dates, geographic locations, and key phrases, such as “starvation”
and “losing a child.” These indexes will be used to create
searchable databases online.
The process is tedious and will require more than 60 volunteers, she
said.
“It’s like going into a concentration camp every day,” Charkoudian
said of listening over and over to the taped horror stories. “One
person alone will get burned out.”
Once the project is completed, Charkoudian said, the library’s
“digital collection will be among the largest in the United States.”
Children of survivors have expressed frustration that their parents’
recorded stories were locked away for preservation and scattered
throughout the country.
“My father-in-law was interviewed four times,” said Paul Der
Ananian, 70, at last Sunday’s discussion. “They gave us a copy and
probably kept the originals in their own archives. But I want to know
how we are going to gather the stories and educate non-Armenians.”
Online databases will be the solution to Der Ananian’s complaint.
When Charkoudian started the oral history project 30 years ago, she
divided the questionnaire into three stages: early life in Armenia,
the genocide, and immigration to America. A former guidance
counselor, she trained volunteers from the community and from
universities to interview survivors. Their stories include memories
of culture clash in the New World mixed with feelings of isolation as
news of the atrocities overseas surfaced.
Coaxing the subjects to open up proved daunting.
“Many of the people had heart conditions,” Charkoudian said in the
parlor of her Newton home before the panel discussion. Most of the
subjects were in their 50s and 60s at the time of the interviews.
Overprotective spouses and children often intervened during the
conversations.
“People didn’t want their parents to relive that,” she said.
Charkoudian, like most second-generation Armenians, had grown up
listening to her father, Peter Bilezikian, speak of the genocide with
family members who visited well into the night. Never invited into
the conversation, the young girl heard the stories through the
bedroom door.
Such was the experience of historian Bob Mirak, who moderated
Sunday’s panel discussion. He has studied the Armenian chain
immigration to Watertown and chronicled their experiences in his
book, “Torn Between Two Lands.” Mirak’s parents were both survivors.
“The stories were always in the background,” he said in an interview
before the panel discussion. “[My parents] didn’t want to scare us.”
According to Mirak, Watertown became a nucleus for Armenian
immigrants who flocked to the Hood rubber plant, which was located
near today’s Arsenal Mall. Nearly 500 Armenians worked at the factory
during its peak in the 1920s.
Mirak recounted the monotonous 12-hour days at the plant. The
immigrants, mostly men, had little time for leisure and were plagued
by feelings of helplessness as they heard reports of the massacres,
even as they raised money for relief efforts and self-defense
battalions.
After World War I, the immigrants sent for their families in Armenia.
Watertown thrived with Armenian coffee houses, churches, and schools.
But today, new immigrants are bypassing Watertown for the greater
economic opportunities of Los Angeles, Mirak said. The Armenian
population in Watertown today numbers 7,000, according to the
library.
At age 92, Peter Bilezikian — Bethel Charkoudian’s father — is one
of only a handful of people who can speak firsthand of the genocide.
His gait has slowed and his hearing is slipping away, but those who
know him well describe the long-retired electrician as “sharp as a
tack.”
In his daughter’s living room, Bilezikian told the story about the
time when a stately Irish woman purchased a lamp at his electrical
shop in 1932. She arrived hot with bigotry toward the young Armenian.
“You dirty Armenian. Why didn’t you clean it?” she demanded.
Bilezikian imitated the woman’s Irish brogue, his voiced laced with
the remnants of an Armenian accent.
“What did you call me?” Bilezikian said, ripping the lamp from the
woman’s hand. He tore out the electrical wiring and slammed the empty
vase back into her hands. “Get the hell out of here.”
Days later, a lawyer called Bilezikian at the store.
“Did you swear at my wife?” the lawyer asked. Bilezikian gave his
side of the story, daring the lawyer to put him in jail.
“At least I’ll get three square meals a day,” Bilezikian said. Soon,
customers poured into the shop in droves to see the pugnacious
Armenian and to “get the dirt” on the Irish woman.
“I made a lot of friends on account of someone’s hate,” Bilezikian
said.
Like most oral histories, some of the dates and factual minutiae
changed when Bilezikian repeated the stories during the interview.
But he remembers the suffering with remarkable clarity. At times, his
eyes grew pink with forced-back tears.
For his daughter, Bethel Charkoudian, chronicling these stories has
been a personal journey. She is already planning the next step.
“Nothing has been done to record the experiences of the second
generation,” she said.
To volunteer for the oral history project, call the Armenian Library
and Museum of America Inc., 617-926-2562 or e-mail
[email protected]. For more on the massacre, visit
the Armenian National Institute website,
www.armenian-genocide.org.