Blog Against Racism Day

My mother-in-law, Marjorie Abrahamian, was an Armenian born in Konya, Turkey. When she was very young, her father was taken away one day and murdered by the Turks. His body was never returned to his wife; only his shoes – a gruesome and deliberate tactic used by the executioners. All her adult male relatives were killed in the massacres. By great good fortune, she and her two young brothers were saved and eventually made their way to Alexandria, Egypt with their mother. She grew up there in an orphanage her mother helped run, and later came back to Beirut – where her boat had landed years before – for her education. That is where she met my father-in-law.

Shortly before she died in her late 80s, she wrote a memoir of her childhood. It was always very difficult to get her to talk about those years, a trait which many children of Armenian survivors have observed. Over the years we had pieced together bits of what had happened, but even the short memories she finally wrote down were selectively chosen by her and the words carefully written. “I didn’t want my children to hate,” she always said. It was true, though, that the experiences she had endured affected her greatly all her life, and the anger, mistrust, and fear of disaster lurking around the next corner were passed down in various forms despite her wish to be a peaceful, calm person. That is the legacy of racism and its most violent manifestation, genocide. Only time and conscious, determined intent can gradually soften and dissolve the insidious effects of racism on a family. But the words of her own story, from the beginning of her memoir, are far better than mine:

“When I first laid eyes on the Arab Middle East, the year was 1924. I was an Armenian child refuge, a survivor of the Turkish-Armenian massacres of Word War I, saved by the American Near East Relief organization in 1919. In the 1920’s, Near East Relief transported many orphans like me to the Middle East and rehabilitated them. Our boat harbored in Beirut, Lebanon (in those days, Beirut, Syria). In addition to hundreds of orphaned children, the boat carried widows and elderly, crippled and infirm men, people on whom the Turkish government had decided not to waste ammunition. The young men had already been killed. We were all “rejects” of a once lively nation, in fact an empire; now during a time of our greatest need, we were rejected not only by Turkey but by many countries, which although better endowed with the earth’s bounties, claimed to have no room for ragged, starving crowds. It was only the impoverished Arab countries, which, having themselves suffered under Ottoman oppression and discrimination, opened wide their doors and received the Armenian survivors. Arabs shared land, without making the newcomers feel unwanted, inferior, or second-class citizens.

When our boat reached the Syrian coastline, I was about six. I could not have guessed what lay ahead for a refugee like me, nor could I have anticipated the happy life I would enjoy with people who at first encounter looked so unfamiliar and foreign. However, I so still distinctly recall the sensation of a happy surprise, the tingling of my skin with excitement as we came closer and closer to that sunny shore, covered with green orchards and groves, dotted with modest brick houses with open doors. Children darted in and out, to disappear into the shade of orchards. Grown-ups also moved around filling baskets, presumably with fruit picked from trees still strange to me. They then balanced those baskets on their heads and carried them away. They walked in a leisurely manner, stopped and visited with each other, shouted orders to the children; they all seemed to be enjoying unhurriedly whatever they were doing. Near the shore boatmen rowed small boats in our direction. They waved and gestured to us with broad smiles, threw rope ladders to our deck and coaxed us to come down, using a few magically produced apples and oranges from the pockets of their “nightgowns” as introductory bait. They all moved so calmly, so freely, without furtively scanning the area around them for supervisors or gendarmes, that they baffled us. So different, so unfamiliar was this atmosphere of freedom from the somber, fearful one we had just left behind in Turkey, where for years we had spoken in whispers and made ourselves invisible lest we attract attention and anger, that we stood bewildered, transfixed and silent on the ship’s deck while our orders kept on reminding us over and over again that we were now in a new country, we need not fear any longer, that we could talk and shout as we pleased."

She went back to Turkey with one of her two granddaughters about five years before she died. Standing in Konya near street corners and churches she remembered from childhood, she asked the Turkish guides, “Wasn’t this an Armenian church? Wasn’t this an Armenian neighborhood?” and was told, over and over, “No, there were never any Armenians here.”

Comments

[zhoen]

In Detroit, at Wayne State University, there is in one of the buildings, a large classroom auditorium, with the story of the Armenian people in a huge mural around the top of the room. It is beautiful and,was for me, indecipherable when I was 19 and vague. I would go back now, and learn the story properly. I grew up around Armenian kids, and their often housebound grandmothers, their family relationships a mystery. There was an Armenian Hall around the corner. And I never thought to find out who these people were, just another group of immigrants in a city rich with immigrants.

Thank you for this story.

[ruth]

beautiful beth. she describes the body language of people without fear so strikingly.x

[Jean]

Beth, thank you for sharing this. Your last paragraph, after such a vivid account, is very shocking. How terrible to have one's past and memories denied. This must not be allowed.

[Marja-Leena]

Oh Beth, such a very sad story! I remember a while back when I posted about the film "Ararat" (http://www.marja-leena-rathje.info/archives/ararat_by_egoyan.php) that you made a reference to your mother-in-law in the comments. That movie opened my eyes to the genocide of the Armenians, that I'd only very vaguely heard about before. Did you ever see the film, Beth? To get back to the "against racism" theme (sorry I didn't write something!), I often wonder if that will ever end in this world!?

[sally]

I have just bought the diary of an Armenian doctor in french but translated from the english version: «An Armenian doctor in Turkey. Garabed Hatcherian: My Smyrna Ordeal of 1922.»
What happened to the Armenian people is known as the first genocid recognised by the United Nations as such.

[anasalwa]

beth,
a beautiful piece. thank you for sharing with us. I've always wonder, at what point of our lives we become a person with compassion, loving, caring, respecting or hating, deceitful, unforgiving and angry?

[qB]

A beautiful piece. Thank you.