Upon first reading your request, I was surprised that 20 to 30 year-olds were asked for their responses to the Genocide. Our generation would not have been as heavily and closely impacted by the massacres as our parents' and grandparents' generations. Upon contemplating the prompt for a few days, I decided that I have spent enough time pondering these issues on my own to be able to express my experience in writing.
Like most Armenians, I had family massacred during the Genocide. From my mother's side of the family, my grandmother's aunt was killed in Izmir along with her husband and two young daughters. In the Hamidian massacres of 1895, my grandmother's father was orphaned when his father answered the pounding on his front door, to be viciously beheaded before his family. His son, sensing increasing conflict, moved to Aleppo, where my grandma other was born. My grandfather's aunt was murdered in Izmir. From my father's side, my grandfather and his mother fled their small village, called Socrat near Palu, to an American orphanage in Kharpert.
My father visited historical Armenia with a Turkish friend in 1973. Once this friend, serving as an officer in the Turkish army, had a conversation with an aged extrain engineer who was involved in the Genocide. The engineer told my father's friend about a running contest the Turks had carried on: "We would bet on how many Armenians it would take to run the train from Erzurum to Kars." (Meaning how many Armenians would have to burn in the boiler to run the train its entire route.) Even after this conversation, my father's friend later expressed some doubts about the reality of this Genocide.
When my mother was my age, she had a 70-year old friend. This woman had been a young newlywed with two children when her husband was killed before her eyes and she was deported with her daughters. Enroute, her younger baby cried for water and the mother begged a Turk soldier for food. After demanding all of her jewels as payment for a sip of water, the Turk did not give any water to the daughter. My mother's friend had her baby drink urine as a last resort, but it failed to keep her alive. The mother and her remaining baby were hidden in the basement of a kind Turkish family. The baby, half dead from lack of water, cried incessantly, jeopardizing the lives of her mother and the Turks whose basement they were in. Left with no choice, the mother silenced her daughter by suffocating her. After losing both daughters to lack of water, this woman never drank anything except the rainwater collected in a pot on her roof. Although half a century had passed since the Genocide, the woman could not refer to it without crying.
The Genocide has affected my parents differently. My mother, who immigrated to America from Aleppo about twenty five years ago, never takes this country's freedom for granted (at the recent Huntington Library George Washington exhibit she began to cry, overwhelmed with pride for the country she now belongs to). However, whenever my mother hears about America's refusal to accept the Genocide due to political alliances with Turkey, her blood boils and it becomes obvious that her loyalty belongs to Armenia. Both my parents' feelings of injustice over the Genocide have transformed into a determination to keep their sense of Armenian culture in the Diaspora, and to pass on that ethnicity to their children.
My father's parents' situation led my father to study genocide and psychology. His mother lived in Istanbul during the Genocide and was consequently not directly injured, but the trauma of watching her family outside of the city be killed while she was spared stayed with her all her life. She married my grandfather in Rhode Island, and it was obvious to my father that their individual tram as effected their relationship to each other. Genocide often arrests emotional development, leaving the survivors frozen in time, unable to mature further. My grandparents built a wall around their trauma. They locked up their souls, disrupting their ability to deal with other people and each other.
I have known about the Genocide for as long as I can remember. My parents taught me and my sister its history when we were children, and the Armenian elementary school we attended reinforced what we had learned at home. As a child being taught that negative behavior has inevitable consequences, I could not believe that the Turks had gone unpunished for their actions. When I learned that they ran aggressive campaigns to change history and even portray the Armenians as murderers, I was astounded. My shock and anger have developed into a passion to educate others about the Genocide and to keep my sense of identity. I am becoming an increasingly active member of the Armenian community, but it has taken me much time and introspection to reach this point.
I had a difficult time as an Armenian-American teenager. Having been exposed to this extremely powerful material as a child made it hard for me to relate to my peers in American public schools. The emotions I had regarding the Genocide were much more intense than the feelings that preteens should experience, so I viewed myself as an outsider. Many students in my predominantly white high school were prejudiced toward Armenians, and I was teased for being Armenian as soon as I entered the public schooling system.
My self-esteem was replaced with intense self-consciousness and self-denial, and so I tried to change who I was. I bleached my hair, wore green contact lenses, and denied my ethnicity for five years. I misled my friends into believing that I did not speak Armenian, that I was only about a quarter Armenian, and that I had attended Catholic, not Armenian, school for seven years. I shared an eight grade class with one of the boys from that school, and I tried to avoid him for the entire year. He would speak to me in Armenian and I would answer in English if I answered at all. In my ninth grade Spanish class, the teacher asked me my mother's maiden name. I pretended not to know so as not to reveal that both of my parents were Armenian. I did not participate in Armenian activities and did not associate with Armenian students. I lied to my parents so as not to miss school on January 6 and April 24.
Once I graduated from high school and moved to San Francisco, the magnitude of what I had done hit me. The Turks had tried erase our culture, language, and beliefs. I had helped. I stopped denying my ethnicity, started writing and reading Armenian again, and began studying the Genocide. The guilt from misleading my peers was replaced by a new sense of guilt stemming from the fact that I was alive, healthy, leading a life of privilege.
Now 20 years old, I have grown out of carrying around most of this guilt. I realized that part of the way I viewed myself was connected to the Genocide, meaning that I looked upon myself and all Armenians as victims. This led me to redefine victims as survivors, which let me respect myself and my fellow Armenians. My ethnicity, which I blamed as the cause of my pain as a young teenager, has become something I am proud of.
As the Turkish Government works to change history and teach new generations lies, the gap between the two cultures widens. The suspicion I feel when meeting a Turk (the opposite of the bond I feel when meeting an Armenian) stems not from history but from the present: the Genocide has bred in me a desire for justice. And as most Turks deny the Genocide (whether they are ignorant, miss-instructed, or intentionally deceitful) I do not feel I can identify with them on even a basic level.
Education is imperative if we want history to keep from repeating itself. Armenians must work twice as hard to educate its people and others with the truth of the Genocide. If I have children, I will teach them about the Genocide from a young age, as my parents taught me, but I will try to portray Armenians as survivors and builders instead of victims.
