Orange County Doctor Finds Misery, Courage in Armenia

Amid all the grief and horror, perhaps the most riveting experience for Orange County physician Garo Tertzakian was when he spoke last week to the elderly Armenian driving a car with two coffins in the back seat.

The old man, alone on the road, said he had been able to identify the bodies of two relatives. They lost their lives only days before in the devastating earthquake that killed upward of 55,000 and left 500,000 homeless in Soviet Armenia. “I’m going to help you bury your people,” Tertzakian recalled telling the old man.

And so, the grieving Soviet Armenian and the American Armenian physician who had returned to the land of his grandfather in its hour of need placed the coffins in the ground of a cemetery on the outskirts of one of the scores of Armenian cities and villages virtually leveled by the Dec. 7 temblor.

“That was the most heart-breaking experience I’ve ever had in my life,” Tertzakian said. “This was the low point of my mission.”

Tertzakian, a urologist who lives in Cowan Heights and has offices in Tustin and Orange, was among the State Department’s first authorized planeload of physicians and search-and-rescue experts to travel to the quake-ravaged towns of Leninakan, Spitak, Kirovakan and smaller villages.

On Sunday he returned home and was immediately rushed from Los Angeles International Airport to a meeting in Glendale, where hundreds of Armenian-Americans waited to hear his firsthand account.

In his party were Armenian-American orthopedist Vartkes Najarian of Los Angeles and Louise Simone, executive vice president of the Armenian General Benevolent Union.

“Our most difficult time was flying there,” Tertzakian recalled in an interview Sunday afternoon moments after his plane landed. “Psychologically, everyone was depressed. You are not going to a normal place.

“We had thought there would be a terrible devastation. There was.”

Tertzakian recounted his experiences to a reporter as he rode from the airport Sunday to the Glendale meeting.

During his week in Soviet Armenia, Tertzakian treated some patients who were injured in the earthquake but for the most part had served as expert adviser to the Russian and Armenian physicians who had preceded the American party to the site of the tragedy.

He also acted as liaison for other foreigners who arrived to aid the effort but who were unfamiliar with the language and bureaucracy.

Tertzakian had traveled to the region twice before, this year and last, at his own expense as part of a medical exchange program to share his expertise with Soviet Armenian physicians.

By Dec. 11, when the U.S. delegation arrived in Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia, the doctors who had preceded him already had treated thousands of patients, Tertzakian said.

Upon their arrival and amid the confusion of hundreds of incoming planes, the U.S. party contacted proper authorities and arranged for a city bus to take them to Leninakan, one of Soviet Armenia’s larger and most ravaged population centers.

The Soviet government’s response to the emergency was slow, Tertzakian said. As a result, even after he arrived there were “people taking fate in their hands and digging in the rubble.”

“It was not a deliberately slow response,” he said. “They just did not know how to handle such an emergency.

“The government structure in the Soviet republics is very weak. The central government in Moscow wants to do everything. The local republics like Armenia . . . really do not have enough authority to take care of their own people.”

The roads were cluttered with trucks and other vehicles carrying salvaged belongings as families fled the devastation. To Tertzakian it conjured images of the great Armenian exodus after the slaughter at the hands of the Turkish Muslims 7 decades earlier.

“That affected me a lot to see the Armenian people on the road and being forced to move their belongings again--not from the force of human beings as in 1915, but from the force of nature,” he said.

“It was like Dante’s inferno, it was like hell,” Tertzakian said. “There was smoke coming out of the rubble. . . . There were . . . corpses here and there.

“It was totally heart-rending. I was crying.”

With sunset, Tertzakian stared out at “shadows in the dark, totally desperate.” The silhouetted figures were mostly men those whose families had either been killed or relocated. They probed the debris, looking for something. Anything.

“They started bonfires around the rubble that used to be their homes,” Tertzakian said. “One would see a shoe or a picture of a relative. They could see their lives in those pieces.”

At Spitak, Tertzakian toured the rubble and a field hospital set up on a soccer field at the edge of town. At one end of the field, coffins and bodies were being stacked.

“The smell of death was there,” Tertzakian said. “It was like a battle zone. The whole city had been wiped out.”

He estimated that 90% of the buildings were demolished and 70% of the 30,000 inhabitants killed.

“I must say that each and every person of our team was impressed by the courage of the Armenian people, who even in the middle of this pain and sorrow wanted to invite people to their homes so they didn’t feel lonely in big city,” he said.

“Even though this was a very sad mission, it was positive too. It showed people are the same when disaster hits. It doesn’t differentiate between color and creed.”

The vast response from the international community “was a very uplifting experience for me,” Tertzakian said.

“There’s no doubt the Armenian government wants to rebuild every city that was destroyed in the earthquake,” he said. “But just rebuilding a city will not be enough.”

Tertzakian stressed that the rehabilitation of emotionally traumatized residents and the rebuilding of the region’s economy would be as vital as erecting new homes and factories.

But perhaps most important, he said, is the dismantling of the nuclear power plant outside Yerevan. The government has pledged to close the plant within 2 years, he said.

“We flew over that structure and let me tell you, if something happens to that . . . the whole region could be wiped out.”