Armenia - Armenian Golgotha by Grigoris Balakian
This week’s book, Armenian Golgotha by Grigoris Balakian, was a major change of pace from last week’s Borges fantasies. Armenian Golgotha is the first purely non-fiction book I have read has part of my quest. It is the story of the Armenian genocide conducted by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Balakian attempts to tell his own story, as well as the larger story of what was happening to Armenians across the empire. Balakian shares how he was arrested with hundreds of others in Constantinople and then force marched across the country with most of the Armenian population. Death in the form of starvation, sickness, and blatant murder was ever present for Balakian and his people. Eventually, Balakian manages to escape and begins more than a year on the run evading his Ottoman captors. In a reverse of things to come, several German engineers played key roles in helping Balakian avoid his pursuers.
There is no way to read Balakian’s story and not think of the similarities to the Holocaust to come a generation later. While their styles are different, reading Balakian felt like reading something from Elie Weisel. These stories are always horrifying in the truths they reveal. They are also incredibly important because of the reminder that we must always be vigilant to keep these things from happening again.
In doing a little research after finishing the book, I found that determining the exact numbers involved in the genocide is difficult. Apparently, the Ottomans did not have the Nazi penchant for bookkeeping. Despite this, census information before and after the genocide show that the Armenian population was reduced by 50%-90% depending on which sources are used. In an odd coincidence, some of the best documentation of the genocide for the rest of the world came from Max Scheubner-Richter who was a stationed in Turkey as a representative of Germany. By all accounts, Scheubner-Richter was disturbed by the genocide he witnessed, but he eventually went on to make friends with a young Adolf Hitler and became the political mind behind Hitler’s rise to power. Scheubner-Richter was murdered in 1923, so it is hard to know if he was aware of what Hitler would become or if he actively used his knowledge of what happened to Balakian and his people as a roadmap for Hitler’s own genocide.
This book is not a light or easy read by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it is an important book to read. Despite being published originally in 1922, the book did not make it into English until 2009. I think it is an important book because it covers events that are little known here. Maybe if enough people read about what has happened to people like Balakian, we can prevent the next genocide from happening.
Once again, I am skipping forward next week because I have not yet found a book for Aruba. So, next week I will be reading Australian writer Tim Winton’s novel Cloudstreet.
