Draconian laws go into effect, radically curtailing Armenian civil liberties and rights. In February, 1915, interior minister Mehmet Talat informs German ambassador Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim that he is going to resolve the Armenian Question by eliminating the Armenians. As the Germans observe developments, Balakian, along with about 250 other cultural leaders, is arrested and deported to a prison in central Turkey.
Deportation was, of course, a code word, just as the phrase “take care of the Armenians” was a euphemism. By the end of 1915, three-quarters of the Ottoman Armenians were wiped out, and in many villages and towns, entire Armenian populations were massacred. Balakian does not censor the horrors: children forcibly Islamized; political leaders hanged; death squads, armed with axes, cleavers, knives and rocks, cutting and hacking away at arms, legs and necks, then throwing the bodies into ditches and covering them with lime; young girls beheaded like sheep when they do not submit to sexual advances; suckling infants dismembered; faint screams of children being eaten alive by wild animals after having been abandoned. The sequence of atrocities is the Armenian Passion in the religious sense of suffering, and Der Zor (where the killings exceeded 400,000) is the ultimate place of skulls, or Golgotha.
Balakian's prose is hot, unlike Primo Levi's (in Survival in Auschwitz), which is as cool as a scientist observing laboratory test tubes and chemicals. It recreates wrenching moments: a scene of schoolboys pleading with him to be rescued from Turkish mobs; a train ride generating tormented anxiety and melancholy; a German nurse who embraces the decapitated body of a six-month-old infant; Armenians kissing skulls of the dead; four elderly Armenian women uttering a vehement curse worthy of a tragic Greek chorus. The prose is not overheated, however, except when Balakian is pious (quoting from the Scriptures) or sentimental (indulging in purple prose or paeans to nature).
Weighted with eyewitness accounts and distinguished by Balakian's prodigiously sharp memory, this book is not a scholar's history, of course, but an educated prelate's, with an enviable grasp of Ottoman and European history. It explains German and European imperialist designs on Turkey and Turkish resentment, and how Turkey exploited the chaos of war (as Peter Balakian shows in his introduction).
But the author points his finger as well at his own people, condemning a minority of Armenian traitors, but also revealing how the Armenians' openness of mind and heart victimized them. Many Armenians found it hard to believe that they could be so viciously hated. There were a few brave uprisings – in Zeytoun, Musa Dagh, Van and Sardarabad, for instance – but the Ottomans used these isolated cases as a pretext for their atrocities.
Despite times of utter despair and pessimism, Balakian survives after living like a wild animal for almost four years in mud, rain and snow. Three things help him: his patriotism, of course; his role as unofficial leader of the deportees; and his knowledge of German. In the course of his adventure, he poses as a German worker on the Berlin-Baghdad railway, a German Jew, a German engineer, a German soldier and a Greek vineyard worker.
But there are also good-hearted, sympathetic Turks who come to his rescue and to that of some other fortunate Armenians. So his book is not a wholesale condemnation of Turks, though it probably won't be read by most Turks, who still can't accept responsibility for one of history's greatest crimes against humanity. It should be, of course, for how could a people be expected to understand and atone for a story they have never been officially permitted to know?
Keith Garebian is completing Children of Ararat, a poetry manuscript on his father and the Armenian genocide.
