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“How Did They Kill Your Grandparents?”
We sat in the parlor, waiting. Finally an old woman appeared in the doorway. She wore a polyester dress onto which ivory lace had been added at the wrists, and a pink crocheted shawl covered her shoulders. Using a walker, she lurched across the small room. She tried to smile up at us while also keeping an eye on her feet. When she reached the chair that had been set up for her, two members of the nursing home staff held her arms as she lowered herself into a tentative crouch. They redirected her several times until finally she landed in the seat.
Then her gaze snapped up at the assembled visitors. With her eyes wide open, she said in Armenian, “Tajik al gah hednerin?”—Are there Turks among them, too?
“No!” several staff members called out.
The woman was Onorik Eminian, a ninety-six-year-old resident of the Armenian Home for the Aged in Flushing, Queens. It was March 2008. As part of the annual genocide recognition campaign preceding April 24, a public relations firm had invited journalists to hear eyewitness accounts from the home’s elderly residents who had survived deportation. The event was put on by the local chapter of the Knights and Daughters of Vartan, a fraternal organization named for Vartan Mamikonian, an Armenian military hero and saint who led the Armenians against the Persian army in AD 451.
I looked around at the other journalists—a few reporters from Queens neighborhood papers, one from Connecticut, and a journalism student from Columbia University. Their faces were blank; only the student and I were Armenian, and the others had not understood Onorik’s opening remark. The public relations consultant, who was not Armenian, had not gotten it either until one of the aides translated for her. Her face lit up.
“Did everybody hear that? She asked whether there were any Turks present!”
Then, the sound of pens scribbling.
I had come as a reporter, but I didn’t intend to write about the event for any newspaper. I’d had it in mind for some time to visit this nursing home to talk to the survivors in residence. My growing ambivalence toward the diaspora’s genocide recognition efforts was starting to worry me, and I thought the quickest way to remedy this would be to cut through all the lobbying and hateful rhetoric and simply sit down with some elderly Armenians to hear what they had suffered. But before I managed to arrange a private visit to the nursing home, I received a press release inviting journalists to this event. So much for avoiding politics. That is how I found myself disembarking at the end of the subway line and wending my way, Google map in hand, to this quiet street in Queens. From a distance, I noticed an Armenian flag waving atop a pole at the end of the block. It stood alongside a redbrick colonial-style home with gabled windows, set oddly amid the tall box-buildings of Flushing.
The executive director was Aghavni Ellian (she went by Aggie), a trim, sixty-something woman who spoke with an extraordinary outer-boro rasp. The home was founded in 1948, Aggie told us. One day, at the Armenian church on 187th Street in Washington Heights, a little old Armenian lady sat crying on the steps after Sunday service. A woman named Siranoush Sanossian noticed her and asked why she was crying. “I have only one son and his wife threw me out,” the woman had said. “I have nowhere to go.” Sanossian took the woman in. Later, with the help of friends, she found a small house in Queens with just a few bedrooms for elderly Armenians who needed a place to live. The project was soon incorporated, and in 1954 moved to its current location, which was licensed as a seventy-nine-bed retirement home. It was an elegant old house, its huge backyard brimming with cherry trees in blossom.
The home had many genocide survivors in residence. “Every year we lose a few,” said Aggie. “In fact, two of the people on your list”—we had each been given a stapled pamphlet containing the names, photos, and birthplaces of the survivors we would meet—“will not be able to join us today after all.”
The day’s event was not unique, she told us; it was a matter of course to involve the survivors in genocide commemoration events, whether at Times Square on April 24, or in Washington, DC. Some of the residents had attended a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the genocide resolution a few months earlier. “We also bring some of the other elderly Armenians that like to come and who feel that they are survivors, and I think in their own way they are.”
“They sit in the front row and they get recognition,” added Linda, the PR consultant. “It’s really great.”
* * *
ONORIK EMINIAN WAS born in 1912, in İzmir, a Western coastal city in Turkey. According to the pamphlet, she was rescued by the Red Cross and put in an orphanage in Turkey, then “somehow she was transferred to Greece” before coming to the United States in 1930.
“Onorik, would you like to explain how your father died?” Aggie asked her in Armenian.
Onorik’s voice emerged with the round, ringing timbre of an old-fashioned telephone. “Again, you want to hear it?” She paused and then added, “Just as long as there are no Turks here.”
“No, no, there are none here!” came a chorus. A staff member explained to us that on a recent visit to Washington, the elderly had come face-to-face with Turkish protesters.
Linda, the PR consultant, tried to move things forward. “Onorik, can you please tell us what happened to you and your family during the Armenian genocide?”
“Every time I remember I start shaking,” said Onorik. She drank some water, sat quietly for a bit, and then said, “Kleenex.”
A whisper went up—what did she say? Linda called out for a translation. Onorik had said “Kleenex” in English, but it had sounded like a foreign word to those who could not switch languages with the flickers of an elderly immigrant’s mind. Everybody stared at Onorik.
“She said ‘Kleenex,’” someone explained.
“Onorik, how old were you?” asked Linda.
“I am fifty-one.” She was ninety-six.
“I was a little girl, I was playing ball, and my aunt and my uncle went to get the license, they were going to marry. It was a Saturday morning exactly, and then I saw the dogs on their horses, running, and holding knives.”
“She’s referring to the Turks,” Aggie slipped in.
“All of a sudden my grandmother grabbed me and pulled me inside. I said what’s the matter grandma? And she said it’s the Turks, they’ll take you! Come inside!
“So we went in. We had a beautiful big yard in the house. And next door the neighbor, they put a stepladder and she said take the kid, we can go to the church or something and be protected. So they put me in the stepladder, I climbed next door, the building to the roof. My grandmother started to cry looking for her daughter. So we went to the church. It was a Protestant church!” she remembered suddenly. Onorik had settled into English now, but her sentences rolled over one another as though someone had shuffled a set of notes and handed them back out of order.
“It was so crowded inside there was no space. We had to sit outside with my grandmother, and she was crying and crying.
“So finally I don’t know how it happened, that part I don’t remember, my uncle, my grandmother, my aunt, we went home. The doors closed, the windows closed. But all of a sudden they knocked the door. My grandmother says don’t touch the door.
“The Turk he says to me, pulls my hair, where’s your father? I said I don’t know, he didn’t come home yet. And he says don’t you lie to me. And he holds my hair and we look in every room, underneath the beds, the closets. So there was two Turks. One started walking and the other says efendi, efendi, see this stepladder maybe they’re hiding downstairs.
“And they take me down and say where’s your father? I say I don’t know, he didn’t come home yet. They slapped me a couple times, pulled my hair, I had long hair. My mother says leave her, she’s only a kid, why are you hitting her? So we went down those steps and my father over there says to me shhhh. And they heard him and they beat him up and brought him upstairs. And my mother was feeding the baby, we had a little baby, and
they said why are you hiding your husband? And my mother says I didn’t know he was home. And they beat him and he said leave my family alone. And I was there crying. And my mother sitting feeding the baby. And the baby cried. So they took the baby, my baby brother who was little, maybe one month two months old, they took the baby so my father got mad. So they slapped my father very bad. They took my father, they left, and I was crying, crying, I want my father, I want my father. The Turk said you want your father? You’re gonna have it later on not now.
“So then me, my mother, my grandmother, and my baby brother we all sitting crying and my father says don’t cry honey I will be back, and when I come back I’ll bring you figs. They took my father they went. I don’t know how long. I don’t know, I’m a kid.
“Those two they came back. Listen this. They came back. And we opened the door and he said you want your father? And I said yes, where is he! And they opened a little bag and they opened the bag and they pulled out my father’s jacket, the sleeve of his jacket. There’s your father. And also the pants. There’s your father.
“And my mother said don’t you feel shamed a little bit? You’re showing this little kid what you did to the father? He said you talk too much you gonna get it, too.
“They brought the jacket and the pants and it was all blood.” With those words Onorik started crying. The attendants tried to comfort her.
After a moment she said, “So anyway. That’s all right. So this is it. They killed my father. So my mother starts crying, my grandmother, and I was crying, too.”
And then she paused, a bit confused, and a staff member prompted her from across the room: “They killed your father, they killed your mother, and they killed your little brother…”
Onorik repeated the part about the bag of clothes again. And then she continued, “I kept saying my father my father my father! And my mother said she’s a little girl, don’t hit her anymore she doesn’t know what’s happening and they said you have a big mouth you gonna get it, too.” And then Onorik gestured a shooting motion with her hands, and in a falsetto burst she said, “pop pop pop pop pop pop they killed my mother too right in front of me.” And then her grandmother and baby brother. Then they hit her with the butt of the rifle. “I got witness for you,” Onorik said, and pointed her jerking finger at a scar between her eyes.
“I go next door because I was really blood. She takes the salt and puts it with a handkerchief.” She meant the neighbor, I guess.
“See, this mark, it didn’t go away, and I’m fifty-one years old, very soon I’m gonna be fifty-two…”
Someone asked her to explain how she escaped, but things started to get really mixed up and Aggie said, “I think this is enough.” But then she added, “Did they take you to an orphanage?”
“You want the orphanage, too?” said Onorik.
“How did you get to Greece?”
“Oh, long story, I’m gonna tell you.”
She began a confusing chapter about disguising her uncle in a dress and a head scarf.
“Just tell us how you got to Greece.”
“Now I’m going to tell you in full!” she said.
A jumble of details followed, something about her father making donations to German organizations, her sister, American flags, boats, then somehow she ended up in Greece at an American orphanage.
“God bless American navy I tell you, they saved my life, that’s why I’m alive today, fifty-one years old.”
Onorik was stuck on the part about how they got to go to the ship. And how on their way to the ship they saw that the young girls and the teacher—which young girls and which teacher was not clear—were tied to trees in front of the orphanage, naked, their heads shaved. She used the Turkish word for stark naked, çırılçıplak.
“The ship was there, we see it, the ship was there, we’re gonna go…”
The story became incoherent. We sat still and waited. The staff was trying to tell Onorik it was okay. “Thanks, sweetie, that was enough.” But now she was inside it completely and did not want to stop.
“American navy gave us bread, an Army blanket for five children. First they put us in a little boat that took us to the large ship. They said to us, ‘Don’t worry, the Turks aren’t gonna get you anymore.’ One blanket five children. Italian bread, the square Italian bread, we had to eat, four of us, that one bread.
“It was a lady, an American lady, Miss Kishman, she says children don’t cry, I’m going to go get a little orphanage and take you over there. And they teach us ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee.’
“And the American navy says don’t worry, we’re here, the Turks can’t come for you anymore.”
She repeated these few themes over and over. The boat, the navy, the naked women in the yard. Wandering the caverns of her ninety-six-year-old brain in search of the memories of a three-year-old girl.
Then she described seeing a priest stabbed through the orphanage window. As she circled around her story, the room filled with an awareness that nobody was in control anymore. Neither was anyone in a hurry. We were with Onorik completely. But all the same, it was a Sunday afternoon in Queens, press releases had been sent out, and the organizers seemed to feel they needed to apologize for the way their painstaking preparation was unraveling into this confusing tale.
Aggie stepped in. “You know, she’s told a wonderful story that has been consistent with all the stories she’s told us from the onset.”
Several staff members were gathered around Onorik, trying to convince her that she had done fine. Onorik felt the pressure of her mandate to perform. That much was obvious. The kindness of the staff members and their devotion to the residents was evident, too. But to set loose such a narration and then try to corral it—well, who could say what to do? Was it kinder to stop her, or to let her talk as long as she needed?
As Onorik was escorted out of the room, gripping her walker, kneading the carpet with it, she turned her head just slightly over her shoulder. “Don’t forget, American people the best people!” Her voice gave way to tears again. “American navy saved my life today. And I’m not lying, I got witness, this”—she pointed to her forehead again—“I’m not lying what they did to me!”
Throughout Onorik’s story, one of her elder coresidents, Adrineh, sat at her side in silence. Adrineh was ninety-eight. She was born in 1909 in Adapazarı, in northwestern Turkey. Aggie warned us that Adrineh could be ornery; whenever she was asked to repeat the story about what happened to her a very long time ago, Adrineh would get annoyed and snap, “You’d better start remembering what I say.”
But the Adrineh we saw now stared dully into the distance. The bags under her eyes hung halfway down her cheeks, elongating her face in a way that reminded me of Munch’s The Scream.
A case manager working for the home said, “Adrineh, these people are here because they want to ask about how the Turks hurt your family and what you remember about what happened.”
“Ask.”
The publicist tried. “What was it like during the Armenian genocide when you first saw the Turks? Do you remember what happened?”
Silence.
“How old were you?”
Silence.
“Where were you?”
She sat motionless.
“How old were you? You were a little girl, and then the Turks came. You remember?”
“Yeah.” She paused. “They came and killed.”
“Killed who?”
“Us, the Armenians. My grandmother had studied at Oxford. My grandfather was a bank director.” The staff looked at one another. Nobody was certain what she meant by Oxford, an issue that had apparently come up before.
“So the Turks came and did what?” asked Linda.
Adrineh paused a long time again and then said, “What didn’t they do?”
“How did they kill your grandparents?”
“They hit them on the head with rifle butts and threw them into the water.” This streamed out of her like one long word.
Then Aggie broke in and explained that the story was really incredible, but that we might not be able to get anything clear from Adrineh today. The staff kept apologizing.
Somebody asked, “What do you want them to do to the Turks?” No answer came, and the question was repeated twice more.
“Voch mi ban,” Adrineh finally said in Armenian—not a thing.
Then after a long silence and more apologies from the staff, Adrineh smiled broadly and said, “My mother pulled someone’s tooth out!” An aide explained to us that this is how they survived, because when someone had a toothache and Adrineh’s mother pulled out that person’s tooth, it was assumed that the mother was a doctor, and sometimes doctors were spared because they could be of service.
How many years ago had these stories degenerated into this? I wondered. I thought of my own grandmother’s long journey into dementia; there were so many switchbacks along the way, and perhaps yesterday or an hour from now Adrineh’s command of her story would be entirely different.
We moved upstairs and crowded into a small dining room that held a square table set for eight or ten. It felt like some kind of tea party in an eerie dream; almost everyone in the room was female, and several of the elderly women were seated at the table smiling expectantly at the visitors squeezed before them.
Perouz Kalousdian was ninety-eight years old. She was born in 1909 in Palu, a town on the banks of the Euphrates in what is now Elâzığ, Turkey. She used to be a high-fashion designer, we were told, and she was wearing a flowing red blouse and skirt of her own creation. A murmur of compliments—“beautiful,” “what a lovely outfit”—came from the guests, who had been almost entirely silent until then. Perouz nodded, then began without prompting.
“I was six years old when the war happened in my country. So they took all the men, they tied up two together, and they were gone, to Yeprat Ged”—the Euphrates. “It’s a river in Armenia.” Her voice had all the weight of New York, the husky vernacular to which immigrants from around the world donate upon arrival, a bit of wherever they came from layered on top of whatever they find in Rego Park or Sheepshead Bay.
There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond Page 3