Remembering September 11

The previous owners in a residential neighborhood of Berlin had called their home "Villa Sans Souci", and when former Ambassador Ashod Voskanian moved his Embassy there, he thought: What better way to describe the relations between Armenia and united Germany.

At 8:45 A.M on September 11th the world changed forever when American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC). The irrational tragedy was compounded 18 minutes later, when a second flight, United Airlines flight 175, slammed into the WTC's other tower. The United States was grappled by fear as the politics of international terrorism hit home. It was the first ever air attack on the continental United States.

On Sept. 11 - I was awakened by a phone call from my future brother-in-law. My parents had arrived at 3 a.m. that morning driving in from North Carolina for my sister's wedding that coming weekend and I was in a semi- comatose state. When I turned on the television I was in shock but I soon found myself loading up my still cameras and film readying myself to go down to the scene.

It's "lahmadjun" Armenian pizza night at the church hall in Cologne but the group of twenty something university students and young professionals are more interested in what other Armenians in their age group are doing to keep their ethnicity alive in the Diaspora.

For a country which has faced crimes against the Jews during the Second World War with humility, and spared no effort to pay for its past mistakes, Germany remains reluctant and even unwilling to recognize the Armenian Genocide by Ottoman Turkey in 1915. But for a handful of activists, this hesitation which some see as nothing but procrastination on the part of the German government has only increased their determination despite a certain degree of apathy from large segments of the Armenian Diaspora in Germany.

Life in a refugee camp is not a pleasant thing, even in an affluent country like Germany, but what makes it more difficult is the feeling of uncertainty over the future facing thousands of Armenians trapped in what many describe as a large prison.

The simple tombstones in an old cemetery on the outskirts of Stuttgart stands witness to the suffering of the thousands of young Armenian prisoners who fell into Nazi hands during the Second World War. "I traveled across the free world, but found nothing like Armenia. It's with that nostalgia that I died," reads the inscription on the tomb of Armenag Stepanian, dated 1950.