No Escaping the Memories

It’s a memory she says only death will erase.

Siranosh Papazian Tanossian was born almost 100 years ago in the village of Izmit in northern Turkey. But today, the North Hills resident recounts with surprising detail so many memories, some happy, some of horror, from her days in the seafaring community.

As a child, Tanossian attended kindergarten in the morning, played in her father’s fabric shop after school and spent summer vacations in Istanbul.

Though Turkish soldiers and police had burned and looted Armenian villages and massacred their people in sporadic attacks between 1876 and 1909 in an effort to “cleanse” the country of non-Muslim minorities, the young girl believed the atrocities were a thing of the past. She expected to peacefully live out her days in her village.

But on the night of April 24, 1915, Turkish soldiers rounded up and executed hundreds of thousands of Armenian community leaders, merchants, artists, clergy and intellectuals.

The following day, Armenian families--including Tanossian and her grandparents, parents, brother and sis ter--were forced from their homes and ordered to march toward Der El-zor, the desert east of Aleppo in modern-day Syria.

The deaths of 1.5 million Armenians by execution or starvation are considered by many historians to be the century’s first genocide.

And the current mass killings and deportations of Kosovo Albanian refugees by Yugoslavian authorities are for many Armenians a reminder of their tragic past.

“The obvious parallel is the ethnic cleansing,” said Levon Marashlian, an associate professor of history at Glendale Community College. “These pictures of refugees are really sad . . . they evoke images of Word War I refugee camps.”

Because the situation is still unfolding in Kosovo, he said, the slayings and expulsions may eventually be characterized as a genocide.

“I don’t want to minimize the suffering of the Kosovars, but the survivors who get out are being allowed to live [in border countries] and they are getting help from international agencies.

“The Armenian ethnic cleansing had the added dimension of genocide--the intent to eliminate an entire group,” he said. “Armenians were killed in their villages or pushed to the desert where they died of starvation.”

Armenian Americans will commemorate the 84th anniversary of the killings and deportations with prayer vigils, speeches and demonstrations across the San Fernando Valley and throughout Southern California beginning Friday and continuing through April 24.

The remembrances will not only recall the loss of innocent life, but also will undoubtedly refocus Armenian efforts to persuade the U.S. and Turkish governments to recognize the mass slaughter as genocide.

Former President Bush and a majority of senators opposed an Armenian genocide commemorative resolution in 1990, citing the U.S.’s diplomatic, military and economic ties with Turkey.

“I don’t feel that our government should take an immoral position when it doesn’t have to,” Marashlian said. “America can recognize the Armenian genocide and still have Turkey as an ally. Turkey needs America more than America needs Turkey.”

Marashlian cited a 1939 quotation of Adolf Hitler--”Who nowadays remembers the extermination of the Armenians?”--as the Nazi dictator’s way of justifying the slaying of 6 million European Jews.

If swift and just punishment had followed what Marashlian said was perhaps “the mother of all ethnic cleansing,” the action could have helped prevent the Holocaust, the deaths of more than 1 million Cambodians by Khmer Rouge guerrillas led by Pol Pot in the 1970s and the 1994 slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans, most of them ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus, by Hutu extremists, he said.

“If the Armenian genocide were to be officially recognized by the U.S. government,” Marashlian said, “it could send a powerful message to future perpetrators of genocide.”

The memories remain horribly fresh for Siranosh Papazian Tanossian, 99.

She recently gave a detailed account of the events of April 24, 1915, that changed her life forever.

“The government sent soldiers to people’s houses to collect guns,” she said through an interpreter. “We gave them one rifle, but my father kept a pistol.”

The Papazian family was ordered by authorities to begin walking from Izmit to Izmir, a town in western Turkey at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea.

Soon after they started walking, the family was herded with other refugees onto a train bound for the town of Adana in southern Turkey.

“While on the train, they [Turkish soldiers] were pulling out the men and shooting them,” she said, as tears rolled down her cheeks.

Some time later, the Papazians were taken from the train and put on an ox-drawn cart that was to take them to the Der El-zor desert, she said.

“On the way, the soldiers were beating up the men and calling them gavour, or infidels, because they were non-Muslim believers.”

The eldest Papazians, she said, died before they reached the desert: Her grandmother suffered a stroke and her grandfather collapsed and died the following day. “They were very old. They suffered shock and sorrow.”

Neither Tanossian’s parents, Harout and Arman Papazian, nor her sister or infant brother survived. Her father died of exposure as he ate snow to alleviate his hunger. Her mother and siblings were thrown into a fire.

Alone and scared, Tanossian was taken in by an Arab grocer who tattooed her forehead to indicate that she was a Bedouin, a nomadic Arab tribe. She took the tattoo, she said, to survive.

Eventually, she fled to Syria and at age 16 or 17 married Harout Tanossian. The couple later moved to Lebanon where they raised four children before emigrating to Los Angeles in 1982.

“Right now, I say to myself, ‘I wish I was dead so that I wouldn’t have to remember this whole time,’ ” she said.

Still, there were some good times. “I appreciated my life after I got away from the Arabs and the Turks, married and had my own family,” she said.

Another Armenian genocide survivor, Kevork Der-Tavitian, 89, said he lost eight of the 11 members of his immediate family.

The Canoga Park resident recalled how Turkish authorities forced his family out of their house in Malatya in east-central Turkey and converted the dwelling into an orphanage.

Der-Tavitian also remembered how soldiers piled dead bodies--and even children near death--onto a cart and hauled them away for burial.

“If you complained that the children were still alive, the soldiers said, ‘Don’t worry, they will find rest soon,’ ” Der-Tavitian said through an interpreter.

At 14, Der-Tavitian began walking toward Syria with other refugees. They paid a horseman gold coins to take them by horseback from Malatya to Aleppo in northern Syria.

Der-Tavitian later moved to Lebanon where he married his wife, Mary, in 1936. The couple moved to Los Angeles in 1990.

Der-Tavitian said his father could have survived the genocide because he was a wealthy merchant. Friends had advised the elder Der-Tavitian to flee Turkey with his eldest son and send for his family later.

“My dad said he could not separate from his family,” he said. “Whatever destiny awaits them, I should be there too.”

Valley librarian Ron Weaver contributed to this story.

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’ Armenians were killed in their villages or pushed to the desert where they died of starvation. ‘

LEVON MARASHLIAN

associate professor of history, Glendale Community College