A Reunion of the Displaced

DPs, they proudly call themselves. Displaced persons. Armenian DPs, uprooted by the German army from their homes in Russia and the Ukraine during World War II.

On Sunday, after services at the Armenian Holy Cross Church in Montebello, much of the congregation ambled over to the church hall where a photo exhibition detailed the life of the camp where the Armenian displaced persons gathered after the war in 1945. It was on display as part of a weekend “Armenian DP Reunion,” the first in the nearly 50 years since the Funker Kaserne Camp near Stuttgart was disbanded.

It was an emotional weekend, for those who lived in the camp and those who have only heard tales of it.

“I can’t stop crying,” said Vartouhi Tamamian, 74, at a church hall dinner Saturday night attended by 850 people, most of them former displaced persons and their families. Tears running down her face, she gazed at a picture of herself as a young woman at the camp. “It is like going back 50 years looking at all these pictures. What a time it was.”

It was, for them and for the world. During Adolf Hitler’s two disastrous campaigns into Russia in World War II, his Nazi army captured tens of thousands of civilians and sent them to Germany, to forced labor camps. Among the many nationalities captured were a few thousand Armenians.

After the war, DP camps sprang up across Europe, gathering points and jumping-off points for the millions dislocated by the war.

Word started to spread among the Armenians scattered throughout Germany of an American-run camp near Stuttgart, a former German tank camp where hundreds of Armenians had gathered.

By 1946, the camp’s population swelled to 2,000 and started to take on the atmosphere of a small city. Supplied by the U.S. Army, the Armenians formed a tight-knit community that included a church, school, dance group, newspaper, soccer team, radio shop and even a jail.

“It was like a university town,” said Zefa Mosikian, who was 5 when the Germans uprooted her family from their home in Russia.

She was happy after the war to be in the American zone, she said, rather than the area under Russian control. Like her, the vast majority of Armenians in the camp did not want to return to Russia, where even before the war, life had been harsh under the ironfisted rule of Josef Stalin.

“In Russia, if you didn’t die during the war, you were considered a traitor and they would shoot you,” said Ed Sarkissian, 68, who had been orphaned during the war. “I heard of many friends who returned and were sent to Siberia and killed.”

Sarkissian was 14 when he was offered the chance to come to America in 1946, but he turned it down. The camp had become home.

“I didn’t want to leave my buddies; I didn’t have anybody else in the world,” Sarkissian said. The next year, though, he was told it was his last chance to leave for America, and soon he was heading toward Brooklyn aboard the American ship Ernie Pyle, named for the fabled newspaper correspondent who was killed in the South Pacific.

From there, the DPs scattered, until they came from throughout the country for this unprecedented reunion: from New York and Detroit, from Florida and New Mexico. They heard speeches and gave speeches, they were wined and dined, but mainly they looked at pictures and recalled the troubled times, and the camp that seemed like an island of tranquillity in postwar Europe.

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“The Germans were retreating from the Caucasus when they came for my brother Vahan,” said Michael Minasian, who helped to organize the reunion. “But my mother told the Germans, ‘If you take him, we will come too.’ So they took us all. She thought if he went she would never see him again and she couldn’t bear to lose another child. My oldest brother Stepan had gone to [fight in] the Battle of Stalingrad, and nobody came back from Stalingrad.”

So the Minasian family went and worked in the forced labor camps. They made it to the Funker Kaserne, then came to America and prospered.

And in January 1965, 23 years after the end of the deadliest battle in history, at Stalingrad, the family found out Stepan was alive.

For several people, the displacement brought an unexpected pleasure--romance.

The Nazis were capturing prisoners in Russia as they retreated, taking Garabed Sarkisian and then, in the Ukraine, an Armenian woman named Eugenie. Between her and Sarkisian, the sparks flew like the Russian Katyusha rockets that incessantly lit up the night skies. Shortly after the war, in camp, the two were married.

On Saturday night, 52 years later, the couple recalled the time in Germany before the war’s end.

“They separated us and I was in Berlin when the Americans were bombing there constantly,” Eugenie said. “I was so afraid I was crying, and my girlfriend was so afraid she was laughing.”

Before Saturday night’s dinner, Ed Sarkissian, the orphan in camp, was looking at the photos when he spotted another man also studying the pictures.

“Hey, that’s the guy that put me in the camp jail,” said the animated Sarkissian.

The man, Meharan Awedian, who served as chief of police in the camp, turned. The two started laughing. Sarkissian had to admit that Awedian had jailed him, and rightly so, for stealing cherries from German farmers just outside camp.

Awedian said the American servicemen in charge of the camp had given him a bounty of 60 cigarettes and appointed him chief of police after he turned in a suspicious-looking man who turned out to be a KGB agent.

The DPs plan to meet again, for their memories--though saddened by war and upheaval--are mostly fond thoughts of the Funker Kaserne Camp, and the opportunity to come to America.

“Whoever made it there to Stuttgart, had made it through the war,” said Zefa Mosikian, the 5-year-old girl who began her frightening odyssey to freedom when the Germans forced her family onto a barge in the mine-filled Black Sea. “After the war, it was beautiful. We just enjoyed life.”