Tale Of 2 Aricles: 1992 & 2013 survivors

[man]

The new article is coming at the bottom after this old one:

 

ARMENIAN REQUIEM : A Fine Sense of Survival : THE FIRST ACT OF HONORING HISTORY IS TO HEAR THE STORY. THE SECOND IS TO MAKE IT YOUR OWN.

April 26, 1992|Bernard Ohanian | Bernard Ohanian is a Berkeley-based writer whose recent work includes "A Day in the Life of Italy" and "Baseball in America," both published by Collins.

Eva Ohanian was born, she told us, in 1905 in the village of Toumarza, in central Anatolia, in a four-room clay house where pillows were the only furniture and water came from a spring in the back yard. There was every reason to expect that she'd live her whole life in Toumarza, where she'd marry young and have as many children as God wanted. But her story really began in 1915, when most Armenian stories begin.

 

Turks had been killing Armenians by the tens of thousands in sporadic pogroms, most recently in 1896 and 1909, in an effort to create a nation free of troublesome, non-Moslem minority groups. Then, during World War I, the Turks claimed that the Armenians might collaborate with the Allies and had to be deported. On the night of April 24, 1915, hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople were gathered up by Turkish security police and executed. The next day, Armenian families in virtually every part of the Ottoman Empire were rousted from their homes. Most men and boys were shot on the spot; the women, children and the surviving males began walking, under the rifle prods of Turkish soldiers on horseback. Their destination was Der El-zor, the desert east of Aleppo in present-day Syria.

 

Eva's brother Sarkis, already in America, had sent her a little money, and on the morning that the Turks came, Eva tied it up in a ribbon in her hair while her mother stuffed bread into her pockets. Within days, Eva, her mother, father and younger sister Nazalee were eating grass they pulled from the ground as they walked and drinking whatever water they could find out of sight of the soldiers. Eva saw stragglers shot to death; she saw the sick and starving crawling away from the march to die alone. She and her family walked for three weeks, until the soldiers left them for the night at an informal refugee encampment on the outskirts of Aleppo. Eva was 10 years old.

"Your grandmother died in Aleppo," she said to my father. "My mother." I watched her face, waiting for her to cry, and realized that she was watching me right back, just as carefully. "The first night in Aleppo," Eva said, "she wanted to wash our hair because we had lice. Suddenly, after finishing, she got sick. I remember her throwing up, then crawling on the ground saying, 'I'm sick, I'm sick.' My father sent Nazalee and me off to sleep. The next morning, I heard her saying, 'Keep going. Kill me, kill me.' Blood was flowing from her mouth, and she died. She died. She just died."

 

The three of us fell silent, each considering the horror. I would learn later that Eva's story was unique only in its particulars. In research for their upcoming University of California Press book "Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide," USC professor Donald E. Miller and his wife, Lorna Touryan Miller, the daughter of a survivor, interviewed more than 100 survivors, who told of seeing husbands and fathers bayoneted to death; of mothers who dropped back to care for dying children, knowing that such a move would kill them, too; and of young girls who joined hands and jumped into the Euphrates River, rather than be raped by Turkish soldiers. That night at my father's home, I pulled out several books about the massacres and stared at the photos of Armenian refugee children--the tattered clothes, the vacant eyes, the bare feet. I wanted them to feel less foreign to me, but I kept wondering how that was possible. What did I know about starvation, about cholera, about the despair that led young girls to leap to their deaths? If they're Armenian, I thought, I'm not.

 

"I NEVER SAW MY FATHER AND SISTER AGAIN," AUNT EVA TOLD US WHEN WE went back the next day. "My father's eyes had become so bad that he couldn't see. He asked two women to help him find a place for my sister to live; the four of them went off, and he said he'd come back for me. He never did."

 

Another woman in the Aleppo camp sold Eva to an Arab family, telling her that it was her best hope of survival. And in fact, while Eva dusted, washed and cooked in her new home, the Turks pushed the Armenians into desert concentration camps from which few returned. "The family treated me well," Eva recalled, "but I wanted to leave, to be with my people. I thought I'd have to live the rest of my life in that house."

 

One day Eva answered a knock on the door to find a couple whispering to her in Armenian, telling her to come with them. They had been sent by her brother Sarkis, who had arrived from America in search of his family. In Allied-occupied Adana, a city northwest of Aleppo, Sarkis had met by chance an Armenian from Aleppo, a young man named Hagop, who recognized Eva's picture and knew where she lived.

http://articles.latimes.com/1992-04-26/magazine/tm-1286_1_aunt-eva/2

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PIERCE: The Virtue in Suffering

October 21, 2013

 

By ZACH PIERCE

http://cornellsun.com/blog/2013/10/21/pierce-the-virtue-in-suffering/

 

September of 1922 on the Aegean Sea: The diminutive bodies of two newborn twins, a boy and a girl, are dumped over the side of a Greek ship. Their mother sobs quietly on deck. Somewhere on the Anatolian mainland, her husband is being transported to a prison camp. She is weak from hunger, and bruised from the savage beating she received the night before from a Turkish soldier. For the second time in her life, she has been driven from home and had her entire family taken from her, and she is only 17 years old. Her name is Eva, and she is my great grandmother.

 

A full account of Eva’s story of surviving the Armenian Genocide was written by my uncle Bernard and published in the LA Times Magazine in 1992. (the same as the above one). At 10 years old, she and her family were forced from their village and marched many miles south into the Syrian desert. She watched her mother die outside of Aleppo, and her father and sister were separated from her, never to be seen again. Her situation was so dire that being sold into slavery, where she worked in an Arab home, can only be described as an act of divine providence. And yet, as she recalled these horrors for my uncle while sitting in her living room in Pasadena, near the end of her 84 years, she concluded, “I’ve had a good life. I wouldn’t change anything.”

 

I originally read her words from a distance of incomprehension that could have been measured in light-years. How could a life scarred by so much death and misery ever be considered good? And how could she have never wished things had been different: That her parents had lived to see her marry; that her husband had seen their first-born twins; and that these two innocent souls had been given a chance at life?

 

The existence of evil cannot be denied, and it has been a perennial struggle for humanity to try to make sense of this fact. Cornell’s own Menachem Rosensaft, Adjunct Professor of Law, recently wrestled with this issue in a sermon that was published by the Washington Post, which tells of his search for the presence of God in the senseless barbarism of the Holocaust. As Rosensaft explains, some ultra-Orthodox Jews have “blamed the Holocaust on Zionists who had refused to wait for the Messianic redemption,” while others take a more measured, but less conclusive stance, and reason “that the Holocaust had to have been part of a divine plan, even if human beings could not comprehend God’s reasons.” Yet, this latter point still leaves the question of how God could seemingly abandon his people to be slaughtered.

 

Rosensaft argues that God had not abandoned them, but was with those who suffered: “God was also within every Jewish parent who comforted a child on the way to a gas chamber, and within every Jew who told a story or a joke or sang a melody in a death camp barrack to alleviate another Jew’s agony.” God was with those who endured, who resisted and even those non-Jews who sheltered the persecuted.

 

While Rosensaft helped me see the presence of God in my great grandmother’s suffering, he did not help me understand how she was able to subsequently accept it with such serenity. Among the older generations of Armenian men in my family, it was common to despise the Turkish government, or even Turkish people themselves, for the events that transpired, leaving hundreds of thousands of Armenians dead and many more displaced. That hatred in my family was laid to rest with them and never passed on to me, and I see now that I have Eva to thank for that.

 

Perhaps evil exists because it is necessary; perhaps affliction presents an opportunity. The astounding humility and grace with which Eva accepted her life seems perfectly symmetrical to the magnitude of torture she faced. The events that emptied her expelled all vanity and purified her. It is because she was taken to such desperate lows that she was bestowed with such magnanimous depth. It is because she was separated from her husband that they were able to remain ever faithful after being reunited. It is because she was robbed of her first two children that she was able to love the five that followed so dearly. It is because things looked so grim early on that she was able to look back toward the end and conclude, justly, that it was good.

Edited October 22, 2013 by man

[man]

Chicago centenarian [107 years old] honored as one of Armenian mass-slaughter's last survivors

By Jennifer Delgado | Tribune reporter

October 20, 2013

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-10-20/news/chi-armenian-genocide-20131020_1_armenian-genocide-centenarian-relatives

 

Helen Paloian started her life without a home.

Orphaned as a young child in Armenia, Paloian — then Helen Kherdian — wandered the streets, begging for food and shelter. She witnessed Ottoman Turk soldiers raid her village and deport the locals, just before mass killings that many historians call the Armenian genocide began in 1915, her relatives said.

During those killings, she briefly found refuge in an Armenian church but fled when she learned Turkish soldiers planned to burn it. She later moved into an orphanage that relocated several times across the Middle East until a cousin found her and brought her to Racine, Wis., in the mid-1920s.

On Sunday, a white-haired Paloian sat smiling, surrounded by family in the place that has become her home — St. Gregory the Illuminator Armenian Church on the city’s Northwest Side, which honored the 107-year-old, believed to be one of the tragedy’s last survivors, for her strength, perseverance and faith in God.

“It’s amazing. It’s as if the more bad things that have happened to her in 107 years, the stronger her faith is,” the Rev. Aren Jebejian told church members during a morning service. “By living today, she is an example to all of us.”

Almost a century ago, the Ottoman Turks killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenians as their empire dissolved during World War I. Many historians have called the period a genocide, but Turkey disagrees and has never formally apologized, said Richard Hovannisian, a professor emeritus at UCLA who held the Armenian Educational Foundation Chair in Armenian History.

Born in 1906, according to relatives, Paloian does not remember how her parents died. During the slaughter, two of Paloian’s two older brothers were exiled and a third brother left for the U.S. Later on, she briefly reunited with the third brother but never heard from the other two again, relatives said.

Left on her own, Paloian lived on the streets until she was rescued by a woman from an orphanage, where she stayed until the end of World War I. After the war ended, the orphanage moved to other countries, like Syria and Lebanon. Paloian followed.

By chance, an American cousin of Paloian’s named Jacob Hardy found out she was living in Greece as he was recovering at an American hospital after he served during World War I. Visiting relatives had brought him an Armenian newspaper that listed orphans living in that country, including one he believed was his long-lost cousin.

That suspicion was enough for him to travel to Greece to bring her back to the U.S. with him. The pair traveled as far as Cuba before a Chicagoan originally from Armenia agreed to travel to Havana to wed Paloian, mainly to ease her entry into the U.S.

The two wedded in February 1926 in a civil ceremony in Havana. Once in the U.S., Paloian and her husband, Zadig, decided to stay together and eventually had four children.

To this day, Paloian talks about her love of America and how God has taken care of her despite the hardships, said her granddaughter, Marianne Ajemian. Paloian lives on the top floor of a two-flat with a caregiver in the Montclare neighborhood, just above her son and daughter-in-law.

“She was obviously very blessed … with a strong mind and spirit,” said Ajemian, when asked what has made Paloian live this long. “She loved life and she loved helping people … and I don’t think she ever wanted to say goodbye.”

At the service, Paloian wore a gentle smile as she sat in the pews, sometimes craning her neck to get a better view of the rituals performed at the altar. She clutched a cane inside the church, which was filled with the smell of incense and illuminated by small chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.

Afterward, relatives helped her walk down the stairs to a special luncheon, where children gave her a red rose corsage.

“She had the worst life and God saw fit for her to live the longest. That’s what impresses me,” said her nephew, Chuck Hardy, who sat next to Paloian during the meal. “God works in a mysterious ways.”

jmdelgado@tribune.com

Twitter @jendelgado1