Armenian Genocide Survivor Quotes

Not even children were spared. To see history repeating itself, and the calamities of the past unfolding again, spelled out in the eyes of the victims and survivors, was unbearable. To witness rape and slavery practiced and legitimized, to witness it happen in the 21st century was hideous. Girls as young as 8-9 years old and women all ages were being brutally violated and sold, sometimes for $10. My heart sank with their screams, and we had to do something to help them.

Beginning in late 1914 and accelerating over the next three years, the Turkish government rounded up Armenian men for forced labor, worked many to death building a trans-Turkish railway for German business interests, then shot the survivors.

Many of those who survived stressed that they did so due to Muslim families like these, or else to the bravery of ordinary “good Turks,” and also Kurds, who protected Armenians. For example, a survivor from Adana said, “We were like brothers. Our Turks said later, ‘Whoever was the cause of this genocide, may God blind his eyes.’ They did not wish our death. In fact if it weren’t for these good Turks, we would all have been killed, too. All the orders came from Istanbul.”38

History is a delicate matter in a diverse country. Shortly after the fall of the Alamo—likewise in 1836—Mexican troops defeated the Texans at the Battle of Coleto Creek near Goliad, Texas. The Texans surrendered, believing they would be treated as prisoners of war. Instead, the Mexicans marched the 300 or so survivors to Goliad and shot them in what became known as the Goliad Massacre. Mexicans resent the term “massacre.” With the city of Goliad now half Hispanic, they insist on “execution.” Many Anglos, said Benny Martinez of the Goliad chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), “still hate Mexicans and using ‘massacre’ is a subtle way for them to express it.” Watertown, Massachusetts, had a different disagreement about history. In 2007, the town’s more than 8,000 Armenian-Americans were so angry at the Anti-Defamation League’s refusal to recognize the World War I Turkish massacres of Armenians as genocide that they persuaded the city council to cut ties with the ADL’s “No Place For Hate” program designed to fight discrimination. Other towns with a strong Armenian presence—Newton, Belmont, Somerville, and Arlington—were considering breaking with the ADL. Filmmaker Ken Burns has learned that diversity complicates history. When he made a documentary on the Second World War, Latino groups complained it did not include enough Hispanics—even though none had seen it. Mr. Burns bristled at the idea of changing his film, but Hispanics put enough pressure on the Public Broadcasting Service to force him to. Even prehistory is divisive. In 1996, two men walking along the Columbia River in Washington State discovered a skeleton that was found to be 9,200 years old. “Kennewick Man,” as the bones came to be called, was one of the oldest nearly complete human skeletons ever uncovered in North America and was of great interest to scientists because his features were more Caucasian than American Indian. Local Indians claimed he was an ancestor and insisted on reburying him. It took more than eight years of legal battles before scientists got full access to the remains.