Organized Oblivion

Gaza is destroyed. It will not, at least for the Palestinians, be rebuilt. Those who lived there will spend their lives, like survivors of the Armenian genocide, desperately trying to protect memory.

NEW YORK: I am in The Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center next to the St. Vartan Armenian Cathedral in Manhattan. I am holding a bound, hand-written memoir, which includes poetry, drawings, and scrapbooked images, by Zaven Seraidarian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide. The front cover of the book, one of six volumes, reads “Bloody Journal.” The other volumes have titles such as “Drops of Springtime,” “Tears” and “The Wooden Spoon.”

“My name will remain immortal on the earth,” the author writes. “I will speak about myself and tell more.”

The center houses hundreds of documents, letters, hand-drawn maps of villages that have disappeared, sepia photographs, poems, drawings and histories — much of it untranslated — on the customs, traditions and notable families of lost Armenian communities.

Jesse Arlen, the director of the center, looks forlornly at the volume in my hand.

“No one has probably read it, looked at it or even knew it was here,” he says.

He opens a box and hands me a hand drawn map by Hareton Saksoorian of Havav village in Palu, where Armenians in 1915 were massacred or expelled. Saksoorian drew the map from memory after he escaped. The drawings of Armenian homes have the tiny, inked in names of the long dead.

This will be the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza. They too will soon battle to preserve memory, to defy an indifferent world that stood by as they were slaughtered. They too will doggedly seek to preserve scraps of their existence. They too will write memoirs, histories and poems, draw maps of villages, refugee camps and cities that have been obliterated, set down painful stories of butchery, carnage and loss. They too will name and condemn their killers, lament the extermination of families, including thousands of children, and struggle to preserve a vanished world. But time is a cruel master.

Intellectual and emotional life for those who are cast out of their homeland is defined by the crucible of exile, what the Palestinian scholar Edward Said told me is “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place.” Said’s book “Out of Place” is a record of this lost world.

The Armenian poet Armen Anush was raised in an orphanage in Aleppo, Syria. He captures the life sentence of those who survive genocide in his poem “Sacred Obsession.”

He writes:

Country of light, you visit me every night in my sleep.
Every night, exalted, as a venerable goddess,
You bring fresh sensations and hopes to my exiled soul.
Every night you ease the waverings of my path.
Every night you reveal the boundless deserts,
The open eyes of the dead, the crying of children in the distance,
The crackle and red flame of the countless burned bodies,
And the unsheltered caravan, always unsure, always faltering.
Every night the same hellish, deathly scene –
The tired Euphrates washing the blood off the savaged corpses,
The waves making merry with the rays of the sun,
And relieving the burden of its useless, weary weight.
The same humid, black wells of charred bodies,
The same thick smoke enveloping the whole of the Syrian desert.
The same voices from the depths, the same moans, soft and sunless,
And the same brutal, ruthless barbarity of the Turkish mob.

The poem ends, however, with a plea not that these nighttime terrors end, but that they “come to me every night,” that “the flame of your heroes” always “accompany my days.”

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Milan Kundera reminds us.

It is better to endure crippling trauma than to forget. Once we forget, once memories are purged — the goal of all genocidal killers — we are enslaved to lies and myths, severed from our individual, cultural and national identities. We no longer know who we are.

“It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history,” Kundera writes in “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.” “Human life — and herein lies its secret — takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.”

Those who have crossed that border return to us as prophets, prophets no one wants to hear.

The ancient Greeks believed that the souls of the departed drank the water from the River Lethe to erase memory. The destruction of memory is the final obliteration of a life.

The genocide in Gaza mirrors the physical annihilation of Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Turks, who feared a nationalist revolt like the one that had convulsed the Balkans, drove nearly all of the two million Armenians out of Turkey. Men and women were usually separated. The men were often immediately murdered or sent to death camps, such as those at Ras-Ul-Ain — in 1916 over 80,000 Armenians were slaughtered there — and Deir-el-Zor in the Syrian desert. At least a million were forced on death marches — not unlike the Palestinians in Gaza who have been forcibly displaced by Israel, up to a dozen times — into the deserts of what are now Syria and Iraq. There, hundreds of thousands were slaughtered or died of starvation, exposure and disease. Corpses littered the desert expanse. By 1923, an estimated 1.2 million Armenians were dead. Orphanages throughout the Middle East were flooded with some 200,000 destitute Armenian children.

The doomed resistance by several Armenian villages in the mountains along the coast of present-day Turkey and Syria that chose not to obey the deportation order was captured in Franz Werfel’s novel “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.” Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a Polish-German literary critic who survived the Holocaust, said it was widely read in the Warsaw ghetto, which mounted a doomed uprising of its own in April 1943.

In 2000, when he was 98-years-old, I interviewed the writer and singer Hagop H. Asadourian, one of the last survivors of the Armenian genocide. He was born in the village of Chomaklou in eastern Turkey and deported, along with the rest of his village, in 1915. His mother and four of his sisters died of typhus in the Syrian desert. It would be 39 years before he reunited with his only surviving sister, who he was separated from one night near the Dead Sea as they fled with a ragged band of Armenian orphans from Syria to Jerusalem.

He told me he wrote to give a voice to the 331 people with whom he trudged into Syria in September 1915, only 29 of whom 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.”

He stopped to collect himself before continuing.

“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 halted, visibly shaken.

“What kind of a son is that?”’ he asked hoarsely.

He eventually found his way to an orphanage in Jerusalem.

“These things dig into you, not only once, but throughout life, throughout life, through these days,” he told an interviewer from the USC Shoah Foundation. “I am 98-years-old. And today, to this day, I cannot forget any of this. I forget what I saw yesterday maybe, but I could not forget these things. And yet, we have to beg nations to recognize genocide. I lost 11 members of my family and I have to beg people to believe me. That’s what hurts you most. It’s a terrible world, a terrible experience.”

His 14 books were a fight against erasure, but when I spoke with him he admitted that the work of the Turkish army was now almost complete. His last book was “The Smoldering Generation,” which he said was “about the inevitable loss of our culture.”

The present is something in which the dead hold no shares.

“No one takes the place of those who are gone,” he said, seated in front of a picture window that looked out on his garden in Tenafly, New Jersey. “Your children do not understand you in this country. You cannot blame them.”

The world of the Armenians in eastern Turkey, first mentioned by the Greeks and Persians in 6 B.C., has, like Gaza, whose history spans 4,000 years, all but disappeared. The contributions of Armenian culture are forgotten. It was Armenian monks, for example, who rescued works by ancient Greek writers such as Philo and Eusebius, from oblivion.

I stumbled on the ruins of Armenian villages when I worked as a reporter in southeastern Turkey. Like Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel, these villages did not appear on maps. Those who carry out genocide seek total annihilation. Nothing is to remain. Especially memory.

This will be our next battle. We must not forget.