Sadness remains for Armenians

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Queens Chronicle,NY
April 11 2014


Sadness remains for Armenians

Survivors of genocide recount atrocities by Ottoman Turks


by Victoria Zunitch, Chronicle Contributor Queens Chronicle

Ninety-nine-year-old Azniv Guiragossian has a grief that has lasted 95 years.

"Life has been very hard. I think and I cry," Guiragossian said.
"Sometimes I go to bed, I'm thinking about my life. I open my eyes,
it's daylight."

Guiragossian remembers and cries about her experiences at age four,
walking through the Syrian desert with her mother and other women and
children when the Ottoman Turks killed or deported Armenians between
1915 and 1923.

She witnessed her mother giving birth in the desert to a baby who
died, the death of her mother months later, the near-execution of her
father due to false criminal accusations and his death, soon after,
from what his family believes was a stress-related illness caused by
his ordeal.

It is believed that as many as 1.5 million Armenians, or 75 percent of
the Armenian population at the time, were killed before, during and
after World War I under the Ottoman Empire in Turkey, from 1915 to
1923. The events will be commemorated at a Times Square ceremony on
Sunday, April 27 from 2 to 4 p.m.

The population was reduced to one-quarter of its original size through
mass killings of its male population, and, for the women and children
who were not immediately murdered, being driven to walk through
mountains and into the Syrian desert, starved, deprived of water,
raped and beaten.

Turkey now outlaws mention of what happened to the Armenians, saying,
when it must, that the loss of life happened in the context of war and
was not a deliberate attempt to eliminate a people.

Accounts from the time state otherwise. One well-known primary source
is, "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story: A Personal Account of the Armenian
Genocide," by then-American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry
Morgenthau.

Guiragossian and another survivor, Perouze Kalousdian, spoke with
reporters last Saturday at their residence at the New York Armenian
Home in Flushing, a private retirement facility founded in 1948.

Reminded by her daughter, Arpi Nardone, of something good, the four
children she raised, Guiragossian said, "What do my children have to
do with anything? I love my children."

But for her, the hardship of the march and loss of her childhood home
and family have never been overcome.

"I have had a very hard life because of these events," she said. "I
think and I cry," Guiragossian repeated.

For Kalousdian, age 104, some details have blurred over the decades
but the emotions remain sharp.

"They came to my house. My mother took me by the hand and led me. I
don't know where," Kalousdian said.

She was four or five years old at the time, she said. "I know that I
was crying and asking for food, that's all I know." Her mother told
her, "We don't have food."

As for the men, Kalousdian said, "They took them from us and they
never came back." A few years ago, before some of her memories faded,
she had told a story of Turks taking males over the age of 15,
including her two uncles. They were tied up two-by-two and thrown over
the bridge into the River Euphrates, she had said.

Kalousdian's father escaped harm, she still remembers. "Before the
war, my grandfather sent my father to America because he knew that
something was going to happen."

The family was reunited later.

The stories of these women are accounts of anger and lives colored, if
not defined, by the horrors they witnessed and suffered just as their
long lives on Earth were beginning.

"The Turks have done us a lot of harm. They took all of our homes and
our belongings. We were living like animals. I hate them," Kalousdian
said.

Some Turks from the younger generation are said to be starting to
question their government's official position, especially those who
obtain a higher education in other countries.

Historians consider the Armenian massacres to be the first modern
systematic campaigns to eliminate an entire racial group and a model
used by Adolf Hitler when he planned the Holocaust.

The generation that lived through the massacres is dying off, but the
direct effects are being passed on to a new generation. Guiragossian's
children say that their mother's experience had a strong effect on
their lives.

"They call my mother a survivor and this is a double-edged sword
because, what did you survive?" Shahen Guiragossian, Azniv's son,
said. "We had to live knowing those stories and knowing them from her.
It left a scar."

"She never had the mother's love," Arpi Nardone, Guiragossian's daughter, said.

Nardone grew up hearing stories about how lonely, cold and hungry her
mother had been on the march and its effect on her life, as well as
her mother's story of having been kidnapped and raised from age one to
four by a Turkish family, found and returned to her primary family,
only to be driven into the Syrian desert with other women and children
without food or water.

She finished her youth at an orphanage after her mother died.

"At home every day, she would talk about it too much," Nardone said.
"It bothers me very much, it affected me very much."

Nardone longs for recognition of the events that affected her entire
family. "I'm almost jealous, envious of the Jews because they have
been recognized," Nardone said.

The Armenian massacre was smaller than the Holocaust, she noted,"but
with the same pain."

http://www.qchron.com/editions/north/sadness-remains-for-armenians/article_9552f8d3-c2e2-5455-b67d-2e587a1b6a0a.html