We hear from Manon occasionally, a card at Christmas or on the children’s birthdays. She is still living in Turkey, in our old house in the village, and claims she’s too old to uproot herself and has nowhere else to go. The hospital lies in ruins and is unlikely to function as a hospital ever again, but Manon holds clinics at the house and does her best. I think she’s happy, if Manon could ever be described as such.
Paul’s body washed up on a beach ten miles west of Trebizond. It was too long in the water to know exactly how he died, but the authorities claimed that his injuries and broken bones were due to battering against the rocks. Manon buried him in the old graveyard next to Lottie, which seems fitting somehow.
In the years since our return, work has been a great comfort and distraction for Hetty and myself. I thank God for honest endeavour and for the people of Springfield who keep me busy enough that I don’t think of the Empire for long stretches at a time. There are days when I’m convinced I’m done with it, even if Trebizond does not appear to be done with me.
I have a recurring dream where I’m in the village again. It is springtime and the lemon trees are in blossom. The square is crowded, full of people singing and dancing, much as it was on the day of Vardan Aykanian’s wedding. There is music playing, the oud and the doumbek. People are happy and everything is as it should be. I am standing among them smiling and clapping when I notice the music grow quiet. To my right, I see the band players, all the old men, put their instruments at their feet and disappear into the lanes and side streets. They are followed by the women, and then the young girls in their summer aprons and scarves.
I am weeping now because I know they will come for the children next.
And even as the thought takes shape I see a child walk into a darkened alley.
All the children.
I call out but they cannot hear.
Try to hold them back but I cannot reach.
And there is silence.
Terrible silence.
I stand in the square alone, watching until the last child has gone.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.
But the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:13.
On 24 April 1915, the Armenian intellectual elite of Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, or modern-day Turkey, was rounded up by order of the government and shot.
Known as the Three Young Turks, the men who governed Turkey through the Committee of Union and Progress proceeded to oversee the systematic obliteration of the Armenian people from the Empire. From then until the end of the First World War it is estimated that between 1.5 and 2 million Armenians were killed in what is believed to be the first genocide of the twentieth century. The twenty-fourth of April is commemorated by Armenians worldwide as Armenian Genocide Day.
Although Anyush is a work of fiction, several of the individuals in the story are based on real-life characters or are a composite of several characters I came across during my research. What follows is a brief resumé of their actual life stories. I should also add that the village of Mushar is fictitious and that some dates in the novel were changed to make the historical events fit the timeline of the story, and so apologies to all historians. Finally, the American nurse, Ellen Mary Norton-Gerard, who undertook wonderful work for Armenian children orphaned in the genocide, ran the orphanage in Aleppo in Syria and not Beyrouth (Beirut) as in my book.
DR FRED DOUGLAS SHEPARD REV. DR LYNDON SMITH CRAWFORD (DR CHARLES STEWART)
The characters of Dr Charles Stewart and Hetty Stewart are based upon Rev. Dr Lyndon Smith Crawford and his wife who worked as missionaries in the Trebizond area of north-eastern Turkey, and Dr Fred Douglas Shepard and his wife who were missionaries in Ayntab in southern Turkey.
Rev. Crawford wrote extensively to the American Consulates in Trebizond and Constantinople about the plight of local Armenians and Christians which he witnessed at first-hand. Mrs Crawford ran the American School for Christian Children and was allowed take Armenian orphans and babies into her care when their parents were taken to the concentration camps of Deir al-Zor in the Syrian desert, among others. As happened in the story, all her charges were eventually removed by the authorities. In an account given by an officer in the Turkish army, the infants were taken out in boats, stabbed and thrown into the sea in sacks. Considerably older than the character of Charles Stewart, sixty-four years of age at the time of the genocide, Rev. Crawford died in Trebizond on 22 September 1918.
The details about the life and work of a missionary doctor came from Alice Riggs’ book about her father, Dr Fred Shepard. Charles Stewart’s building of the hospital and his dealings with local people are based on accounts in this book. Fred Shepard was a religious man, much loved by the local population, who was deeply affected by the events he witnessed during the genocide. He contracted typhoid following the first wave of Armenian deportations and died shortly after.
ARMIN T WEGNER
Armin Theophil Wegner was born on 16 October 1886 in Elberfeld, Wuppertal in Germany. In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered as a nurse in Poland and was decorated with the Iron Cross for assisting the wounded under fire. Following the military alliance of Germany and Turkey, he was sent with the German Sanitary Corps to the Middle East in 1915. Later that year, with the rank of second-lieutenant in the retinue of Field Marshal von der Goltz, he travelled through the Ottoman Empire where he witnessed the Armenian Genocide. A keen photographer, he disobeyed the orders of von der Goltz and the Turkish government by taking hundreds of photographs of Armenians on the roads and in the concentration camps, along with notes, documents and letters. Wegner was eventually arrested and sent to work in the cholera wards, where he became ill. In December 1916 he was recalled to Germany and smuggled his photographic plates and notes out of the country. Von der Goltz died from typhus in Baghdad that same year.
At the Peace Conference of 1919, Wegner submitted an open letter to President Woodrow Wilson, outlining the atrocities perpetrated by the Turkish government against Armenians and appealing for the creation of an independent Armenian state.
Between the First and Second World Wars, Wegner’s success as a writer grew, reaching its peak in the 1920s with the publication of Five Fingers Over You, which foresaw the advent of Stalinism.
As the Nazis extended their grip across Germany, he wrote an open letter to Hitler, protesting the state-organised boycott against German Jews. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 and spent the war in seven different concentration camps and prisons.
In 1956, the federal German government awarded Wegner the Highest Order of Merit, and the city of Wuppertal decorated him with the Eduard von der Heydt prize in 1962. Because of his advocacy for the rights of Jews as well as Armenians, he was awarded the title of ‘Righteous among the Nations’ by Yad Veshem in Israel and the Order of Saint Gregory the Illuminator by the Catholicos of All Armenians. A street in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, was named in his honour.
Armin Wegner, intellectual, doctor of law, photographer, writer, poet, humanitarian and defender of civil rights, died in Rome at the age of ninety-two on 17 May 1978.
After his death, some of his ashes were taken to Armenia, where a posthumous state funeral took place near the perpetual flame of the Armenian Genocide Monument.
COLONEL ABDUL-KADAR AINTABLI & JEMAL AZMI (COLONEL KAMIL ABDUL-KHAN)
The character of Colonel Kamil Abdul-Khan is based upon an amalgamation of the Governor of Trebizond, Colonel Abdul-Kadar Aintabli, and a man known as the ‘Monster of Trebizond’, Djemal Azmi. I first came across Abdul-Kadar Aintabli in a document from the Armenian National Institute detailing the eyewitness account of a Turkish army officer, Lieutenant Sayied Ahmet Moukhtar Baas, which was circulated to the War Cabinet on 26 December 1916. In his statement he talks of the Governor’s infamy for his ‘atrocities against Armenians’ and how he had the Bishop of Trebizond murdered at night, which gave me the idea of setting the headqu
arters of the National Guard in the Bishop’s Palace. I could find no specific information on what became of the colonel after the war, but had more success with the fates of Djemal Azmi and his superior officers, the members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), a Turkish nationalist grouping. These were the so-called ‘Three Young Turks’ or ‘Three Pashas’ who were the instigators of the genocide and whose portrait hangs in Abdul-Khan’s office in the story.
After the fall of Constantinople to the Allies in 1918 and the signing of the Armistice of Mudros, the leader of the CUP, Talat Pasha, resigned on 14 October and fled Turkey in a German submarine on 3 November. Sultan Mehmed VI instigated a court martial to punish the CUP for the Empire’s ill-conceived involvement in the First World War and ‘the massacre and destruction of the Armenians’. The three members of the CUP, Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha and Djemal Pasha were sentenced to death, but all of them had fled to Germany. British Intelligence pressured the Grand Vizier to demand that Germany extradite the Pashas to stand trial, but Germany responded that it would do so only if papers could be produced proving that the men had been found guilty.
On 15 March 1921, Talat Pasha was killed by a single gunshot as he came out of his house in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin by Soghomon Tehlirian, a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), as part of Operation Nemesis to assassinate all members of the CUP and those guilty of crimes against Armenians.
On 25 July 1922, Djemal Pasha was assassinated by the ARF in Tbilisi.
The third member of the triumvirate, Enver Pasha, fled first to Germany and then to Moscow. Having had his services as ex-leader of the army rejected by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) in the Turkish War of Independence in 1921, he travelled to Russian Turkestan on Lenin’s behalf to suppress a Basmachi uprising. After defecting to the rebel side, he was killed by an officer of the Red Army, a soldier of Armenian extraction by the name of Agop Melkumian, on 4 or 8 August 1922.
The ‘Monster of Trebizond’, Djemal Azmi, accused of drowning 15,000 Armenians, was sentenced to death by a Turkish court martial in 1919, but the sentence was never carried out. He was assassinated in Berlin by Arshavir Shiragian on 17 April 1922.
HENRY MORGENTHAU
On 26 April 1856 Henry Morgenthau was born in Mannheim, Germany, into a Bavarian Jewish family. His father, Lazarus, moved the family to America in 1866, and they eventually became naturalised American citizens. Henry attended the City College of New York as an undergraduate, followed by Columbia Law School, and set up practice, amassing a sizeable fortune in real estate. In 1882, he married Josephine Sykes, and together they had four children. He became a prominent supporter of the Democratic Party and served as their Finance Chairman in 1912 and again in 1916 during Woodrow Wilson’s presidential campaigns. Wilson appointed Morgenthau US Ambassador to Turkey in 1913 where he served for three years. During the genocide he appealed both to Talat Pasha and the German military leaders to stop the massacre of Armenians but without success. He wrote to American and European newspapers about what he called ‘The Murder of a Nation’ and appealed for funds to support the refugees in concentration camps. After the war, he attended the Paris Peace Conference as an expert on the Middle East and went on to become involved in many war-related charitable bodies, including the Relief Committee for the Middle East, the Greek Refugee Settlement Commission and the Red Cross. In 1919, he headed the US government fact-finding mission to Poland on the treatment of Polish Jews, and, in 1933, he was one of the American representatives at the Geneva Conference. He wrote the first part of his memoir, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story in 1918, documenting his experiences in Turkey, and went on to write several more volumes covering his time in Poland and Greece.
Henry Morgenthau died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 25 November 1946, aged ninety.
ELLEN MARY NORTON-GERARD
Ellen Mary Norton-Gerard was born in Lake City, Minnesota, in 1883. She trained as a nurse and in 1918 volunteered with Near East Relief to serve three years in Lebanon and Syria. Working at the Armenian Orphanage Hospital in Aleppo, she had over a thousand children in her care, orphaned by the Armenian Genocide. In 1922, she married Frank RJ Gerard in India and moved to Santa Barbara, California, in 1941, where she worked at the Hoff Army Hospital. The Gerards had two daughters, Mary and Hélène.
Ellen Mary took many photographs during her time in Aleppo and Beirut and had more from her travels to Egypt, the Ottoman Empire and India. In 2000, an album of her photographs and some loose photographs were discovered in a military antiques shop in the Los Angeles area, which are now available to view online. Ellen Mary is often pictured surrounded by the children in her care and with her dog Spot. Two memorable photographs in the album are of the ‘blind boy’ and the ‘desert boy’, and the character of Arshak is a composite of both.
Ellen Mary died in 1966 at the age of eighty-three.
About the Author
Martine Madden was born in Limerick and worked in Dublin before moving to the United Arab Emirates with her husband John. In the oasis town of Al Ain she came to meet two Lebanese Armenians who were the first to tell her about the Armenian Genocide. Their stories and the much later discovery of Armin Wegner’s genocide photographs prompted her interest in Armenian history and formed the basis of the novel Anyush.
Martine returned to Ireland in 1990 and now lives in the Midlands with her husband and family.
Copyright
This eBook edition first published 2014 by Brandon,
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First published 2014 by Brandon
eBook ISBN: 978–1–84717–660–8
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Layout and design: The O’Brien Press Ltd Cover photograph: Armenian dancers perform during a rally to mark the 90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, on Syndagma Square in central Athens, 20 April, 2005. Hundreds of Armenians living in Greece marched to the Embassy of Turkey demanding the massacre to be acknowledged by the Turkish authorities. FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP/Getty Images Map: Keith Barrett, Design Image Author photograph: Brian Redmond, AIPPA, Roscrea, County Tipperary
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