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Other people's genocide

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  • Other people's genocide

    Jerusalem Post
    May 11 2005

    Other people's genocide
    By LARRY DERFNER


    Beatrice Kaplanian in Jerusalem's Armenian Quarter. No hard feelings.
    Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski

    Photo: A 100-year-old survivor of the Armenian expulsion from Turkey
    recalls the horrors she survived

    Among Beatrice Kaplanian's sharpest memories from the death march of
    1915 is thirst. "We would cry for water," she says. She remembers
    seeing her father die. "He was so weak. We covered him and they took
    him to the valley. They didn't bury him, they just left him there
    with the others." She saw a lot of Armenians on the march die from
    thirst and fatigue. "Somebody would faint, and he wouldn't get up."

    Sitting outside in her gray-brick, 17th-century rooftop apartment in
    Jerusalem's Armenian Quarter, Kaplanian, whose memories of the
    killings put her age at roughly 100, is Israel's last living survivor
    of the Armenian genocide. Between 1 million and 1.5 million Armenian
    civilians were killed in 1915-16 by the troops and mobs of the
    Turkish Ottoman Empire, mainly on forced marches from Turkey to
    Syria. Another 500,000 to one million Armenians survived and became
    permanent refugees.

    The journey featured widespread rape, as well as mass murders by
    burning, drowning, axing and beating with blunt instruments - this
    last "to save shell and powder," in the words of then-US ambassador
    to Turkey Henry Morgenthau. In this way, live ammunition was saved
    for the Ottoman armies fighting World War I.

    Countless other Armenians died of epidemics in the gigantic
    concentration camps set up along the route.

    Kaplanian is small and somewhat bent over and her hands tremble, but
    she's remarkably mobile and alert and still has a headful of thick,
    straight, blondish-white hair. She moves plastic chairs and a
    clothesline out of the way for the interview, and poses according to
    the photographer's requests.

    Translating my questions into her native Turkish is George Hintlian,
    Israel's leading Armenian historian, a lifelong resident of the
    Armenian Quarter who "discovered" Kaplanian only a few years ago.
    Born Filomena before being renamed Beatrice by her British adoptive
    parents, she is one of some 800 survivors he says he has interviewed.


    The living memory of the genocide is "like a sinking ship, and you
    have to salvage whatever you can," says Hintlian, 58.

    As a little girl in her mountain village, Filomena and her sister
    Christina used to play with the Turkish neighbors' girls. Then one
    day the town crier went from house to house among the Armenians
    telling them that they would all have to leave the next day. Neither
    the two girls, their older brother or their parents understood what
    was going on, the old woman says.

    They took cheese and bread, threw a mattress and saddle over their
    donkey - a relative luxury on the march, only for the well-to-do -
    and the two sisters sat in the saddle while the rest of the family
    walked. They weren't told their destination, but they were being led
    to Aleppo, Syria, some 700 km. away.

    One night one of the "escorts" on the march - who were often violent
    criminals released by the Ottomans especially for this murderous duty
    - snatched one of the pretty Armenian girls in an instant. "We heard
    her shriek," recalls Kaplanian, and the girl was not seen again.

    Twice the old woman cried in the interview. The first time was while
    recalling how she and her sister refused their mother's request to
    sit in the saddle for a few hours to rest her feet, telling her that
    their feet hurt too. The second time was when Kaplanian remembered
    how a Turkish official took her back to Turkey to be his and his
    wife's daughter; she never saw or heard from her family after that.

    The postwar British occupation of Turkey removed Filomena from the
    Turkish couple's home, bringing her to a British orphanage in Beirut,
    where she was adopted and later brought to Jerusalem. There she
    married a shoemaker from her family's village named Kaplanian who
    died some 20 years ago, and they had a son who is now in late-middle
    age.

    A devout Christian whose only book at home is the Bible, she says she
    has "no hard feelings" toward the Turks - or the Kurds, Circassians
    or Chechens, who also took part in the slaughter - over what happened
    90 years ago. "They are human beings too," she says. "My heart is at
    peace." Based on what he knows of other survivors, Hintlian says
    Kaplanian's longevity is tied to her extraordinarily forgiving
    attitude. "The survivors who were filled with hatred usually didn't
    live long lives," he says.

    We met at Jaffa Gate as it was filled with Jews coming for the Pessah
    birkat hakohanim, or "priestly blessing." In the adjacent Armenian
    Quarter walls were pasted with posters for the 90th anniversary of
    the Armenian genocide.

    As with millions of Armenians above a certain age, Hintlian grew up
    on family memories of the genocide. His father was on the death
    march, and he would tell stories about how his father was axed to
    death, and how his baby brother died from acute diarrhea a few days
    after their despairing mother, unable to still the boy's endless
    cries for water that they didn't have, gave him muddy water from the
    ground to drink.

    By contrast, the stories Hintlian heard from his mother taught him
    "that there were good Turks, too," he says. The mayor of his mother's
    village in Turkey, a man named Jellal, who had already been removed
    by the Ottomans from his post as governor of Aleppo for refusing to
    cooperate in the genocide, refused again as mayor of the village,
    costing him that position, too. Jellal won the village's Armenians
    crucial months to prepare for their eventual expulsion, says
    Hintlian.

    "None of my mother's family died on the march," he says. "They were
    wealthy, they traveled in a carriage, and they bribed escorts and
    officials along the way." Many of the Armenian survivors owed their
    lives to such bribery, he notes, while others were aided by
    sympathetic Turks and Kurds, and still others, like his father,
    survived by resourcefulness and simple "Darwinian" stamina.

    His father eventually came to Jerusalem to work as an assistant to
    the Armenian Patriarch, and George later followed him in the post,
    which he held for 25 years. During that time he became a historian,
    publishing eight books on 19th-century Jerusalem and the 1,500-year
    history of the city's Armenians.

    He decided to research the Armenian genocide at age 19 after hearing
    a lecture by the pioneer historian of that cataclysm, Vahakn Dadrian,
    an Armenian-American.

    Yet despite having interviewed hundreds of survivors, both local
    residents and foreigners coming on pilgrimage, and even though he has
    pored over accounts of the genocide left by American, German,
    Austrian and Scandinavian officials in Turkey at the time, Hintlian
    says he has not written a book on the subject and has no plans to do
    so.

    "When Dadrian used to come to the library in the Patriarchate to do
    research, we had to remind him to eat lunch, he just became so
    overwhelmed by the cruelty of the stories," says Hintlian, sitting in
    an Armenian cafe for tourists at Jaffa Gate.

    "Sometimes I go to Yad Vashem and I see scholars coming out looking
    depressed. I don't think I have the nerves and willpower to live in
    that world. It's a hell," he says. "I can read only one week at a
    time (about the Armenian genocide), then I want to stop. I'm not
    suited for this work." Still, he is drawn to the old people he
    interviews. "I start off asking them about their blood pressure,
    their simple human needs. Once they feel you care, they'll tell you
    anything," he says with a gentle smile.

    "But sometimes I'm very worried about interviewing them," he
    continues. Hintlian fears that he may have actually brought on the
    deaths of three aged interviewees by leading them to recount their
    childhood memories from the death march. "Three people died very soon
    after I interviewed them. One died four hours after, another two days
    after," he says.

    He is in touch with Israeli writers who've taken a deep interest in
    the Armenian genocide, above all Yehuda Bauer, the dean of Holocaust
    historians in this country. Others include novelists Amos Oz and Haim
    Guri, politicians Yossi Sarid and Yossi Beilin, broadcast journalist
    Ya'acov Ahimeir and historians Amos Elon, Tom Segev and Yair Oron.

    Another reason Hintlian doesn't want to write a book about the
    Armenian genocide is because of the gaps in its history left by
    Turkey's refusal to open its archives from that period. "German
    archives from the Holocaust have been opened to Jewish researchers,
    but the Turkish archives from the genocide are either closed or
    they've been purged," he says. "So we are in the dark about so many
    details - who [among Ottoman officials] made a particular decision,
    and when. We have to grope our way and try to make sense of it."
    Ultimately, though, Hintlian says he cannot make sense of the
    Armenian genocide, and this is yet another reason why he feels unable
    to write a book about it. He is baffled as to how people could carry
    out an atrocity of such magnitude. "It's an endless mystery," he
    says.

    It's also a mystery to Beatrice Kaplanian, but she doesn't dwell on
    it. Putting her balcony chairs away, she is asked how the God she
    worships could allow such evil. "It is a sin to interfere in the ways
    of God," she replies. "Whatever God wills to happen, happens."

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