War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [52]
Rather, he writes to give a voice to the 331 people with whom he trudged into Syria in September 1915. Only twenty-nine of those people survived.
“You can never really write what happened anyway,” Asadourian said. “It is too ghoulish. I still fight with myself to remember it as it was. You write because you have to. It all wells up inside of you. It is like a hole that fills constantly with water and no amount of bailing will empty it. This is why I continue.”
His passion, however, burns deep. He refused to halt the painful story of his deportation despite having to reach for a bottle of pills. He took a deep breath before plunging into the last bit of detail, one he had left out of the lengthy chronology.
“When it came time to bury my mother, I had to get two other small boys to help me carry her body up to a well where they were dumping the corpses,” he said. “We did this so the jackals would not eat them. The stench was terrible. There were swarms of black flies buzzing over the opening. We pushed her in feet first, and the other boys, to escape the smell, ran down the hill. I stayed. I had to watch. I saw her head, as she fell, bang on one side of the well and then the other before she disappeared. At the time, I did not feel anything at all.”
He stopped, visibly shaken.
“What kind of a son is that?” he asked hoarsely.
I had seen and felt it before, the awful indifference to pain, even your own. But just because he did not feel anything at the moment he released his mother’s body did not mean he did not care. He had spent his whole life honoring the memory of his mother. He had suffered, in later years, that moment of her hasty burial with an awful intensity. It was a display of the curious guilt of the victims who often carry with them torments not borne by the perpetrators of the crimes.
The house fell silent. Asadourian’s son, as motionless as his father during the story, flipped the electric switch on his chair and rolled out of the room.
The Turkish government still vigorously denies the event. It says that some of the Armenians killed were rebels during World War I and others were victims of the fighting and the widespread famine. The Turks claim they escorted Armenians away from the fighting for their own safety. They concede only that, because of the war, some unfortunate incidents took place.
Much of the world of the Armenians, a people first mentioned by the ancient Greeks and Persians in the 6th century B.C., has been reduced to dusty, forgotten relics in present-day Turkey. After World War I, about 25,000 Armenians came to the United States. Some of their tales survive in small American collections of Armenian literature and poetry, like the 15,000 volumes in the Zohrab Center in New York. These books lie unread by all but a few scholars. Little of the work has been translated.
The murder of more than one million Armenians in Turkey is often cited as the opening act for the genocidal campaigns that convulsed the twentieth century. Although the Allied powers condemned the Turks during World War I, there was no effort to hold them accountable for actions against the Armenians. The magnitude of the deaths and ultimate indifference may have led Hitler, on the eve of the invasion of Poland, to remind his followers, “Who still speaks of the extermination of the Armenians?”
The globe is dotted with such anonymous burial pits. They are physical reminders of justice denied. Yet they have a startling power to plague the murderers decades after the event. These atrocities—denied by the perpetrators and sanctified by the victims—leave huge chasms between peoples. They serve to create two distinct and