More than one million Armenians were exterminated by the Ottoman Turks in the first genocide of the 20th century, in what Raphael Lemkin (a Polish Jew and legal scholar who invented the term after the Second World War to describe race-murder) regarded as the template for genocide in the modern era, and what we can now see as the paradigm for the Jewish Holocaust and for genocides in Ukraine, Cambodia, Rwanda, the Balkans and Darfur.
My father was Armenian, and one of a multitude of orphaned victims of the Ottoman scourge. He was not yet five-and-a-half when pan-Turkic ideology flamed into race-murder on April 24, 1915. He barely remembered his own father's face. He certainly did not remember any of his grandparents or their names. What he remembered of his mother was a woman dying as much of a broken heart as from starvation and thirst in the desert leading to Der Zor (widely known as “the Auschwitz of the Armenian genocide”).
Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918, by Grigoris Balakian, translated by Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag, Knopf, 505 pages, $42
My father had an older sister who survived with him, but their youngest sister was given to a Kurdish farmer and his barren wife, and their other sister, a girl also younger than my father, was abandoned to her fate during the nightmarish trek. He could not remember her name when he recounted the tale to me near the end of his life. Children themselves, he and his eldest sister had had no alternative but to abandon this little girl whom they could not feed or care for while they were forced to eat grass or animal excrement. His final image was of a little starving girl, with curly hair, crying by herself beside an inhospitable tree, where she was probably soon taken as prey by scavenging dogs or wolves.
There is irony in the fact that my father was named Adam, though I believe he had his own views on Original Sin. For him, the fall of man was dated April 24, 1915, when hundreds of thousands of Armenians were forced from their homes to be tortured and slaughtered by Turks. My father survived, but his survival, like those of other Armenians who after the First World War dispersed to other countries – defeating the Ottoman plan to exterminate their race – carried burdens of traumatized hearts.
The Ottoman plan for ethnic cleansing was brilliantly evil. The Turks eliminated the intelligentsia so that Armenians would have no active leaders. They eliminated able-bodied men so that Armenians would have no militia. They eliminated the old so that Armenians would have no memory. They eliminated the young so Armenians would have no future.
They were wrong in the final calculation. Memory and hope for the future live in seminal texts such as Grigoris Balakian's Armenian Golgotha, a massive memoir first published in Armenian in 1922 and now making its debut in English via the graces of Balakian's distinguished great-nephew, author Peter Balakian.
By the end of 1915, three-quarters of the Ottoman Armenians were wiped out
The long narrative starts in August, 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War. Born in 1876 in Tokat (a small, multicultural Turkish city), Balakian, whose father was a merchant and whose mother was a writer, is in Constantinople after having studied engineering in Saxony and theology in Berlin, making him fluent in German. Russia has declared war on the Ottoman Empire, and the Muslims have proclaimed jihad against Christians to incite religious war against the Allies, but also inflaming anger toward Armenians, who are resented for their skills and crafts and regarded the way Jews would be in Nazi Germany: as despicable vermin contaminating the nation.
