Panian Karnig, Goodbye, Antoura. A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 2015

GOODBYE, ANTOURA

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

English translation and chapter 9 © 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Longer versions of chapters 1-8 of this work were originally published in Armenian in 1992 under the titles Antourayi Vorpanotseh [The Orphanage of Antoura] by the Hamazkayin Armenian Educational and Cultural Society in Beirut, Lebanon, and

Housher Mangoutian yev Vorpoutian [Memories of Childhood and Orphanhood] by the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia in Antelias, Lebanon. Chapter 9 is developed from an unpublished manuscript and is original to Stanford University Press’s edition.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

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ISBN 978-0-8047-9543-2 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-5036-0063-8 (paper) ISBN 978-0-8047-9634-7 (electronic)

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CONT ENTS

FOREWORD

Vartan Gregorian

The history of World War I is steeped in tragedy so fathomless as to sometimes seem impossible to comprehend. Millions died, both soldiers and civilians. Nation-states emerged; others were carved up, absorbed into neighboring regions, or simply—forcibly—had their name and borders erased from the world map. But if one looks back at this world conflict, a single word among all others asserts its right to define the underlying tragedy of this era, and that is genocide.

One of the tales arising from the seemingly unspeakable atrocities of genocide is given an extraordinarily strong voice in this memoir by Karnig Panian (1910–1989). Panian was a young child when he was caught up in the Armenian Genocide. With heartbreaking and yet affectingly poetic language, he brings the reader into his life as an orphan subjected to the daily abuse that inculcated a devil’s bargain: Forget who you are and we will let you live. You will always remain the “Other” but at least you will be alive, and for that you should be grateful. This combination of outright slaughter and brute-force brainwashing was the first modern example of a kind of historical lobotomy meant to erase an entire people from the record of human existence. Thankfully, it did not work.

The publication of this book is timely because it comes on the eve of the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. And it is presented to us at a time

when genocide and ethnic cleansing are not just isolated episodes but practiced almost routinely around the world. Indeed, genocide seems to be one of the great afflictions of the twenty-first century. In her recent book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power, the current United States ambassador to the United Nations, references acts of genocide against Armenians, and later Jews, Cambodians, Iraqi Kurds, Rwandan Tutsis,­ and Bosnians, arguing it is “no coincidence that genocide rages on” when the world becomes indifferent, overloaded, perhaps, by endless images of atrocities that appear before our eyes in the relentless news cycle that assaults us twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

And therein lies the great importance of Goodbye, Antoura. It is a testimonial to the impossibility of denying the invaluable, eternal, and unalterable humanity of even a single child, and thus, by extension, of his family, his village, his people. Armenians and all those who were subsequently devastated by genocidal acts never simply constituted a political problem to be solved, were never a “category” to be eliminated for the supposed purpose of a greater good or design, never a mere millet to be allowed a measure of auto­ nomy until it suited a greater power to crush it into nonexistence. Karnig Panian will not allow us to rationalize that kind of excuse for the idea that even a single individual’s memory or identity can be taken from him. Bodies­ may be slaughtered, human beings bludgeoned and burned, but if even a single child survives, then memory survives as well. Memory cannot be assassinated. Truth cannot be denied. Karnig Panian survived, along with the revelatory truth of his story, and all of humanity is enriched by what he remembers and what he relates.

This is a remarkable and unforgettable book. It is an indispensable tool for awakening our consciences, restoring our collective sense of decency, and forging our solidarity with all those who have suffered the horrors of genocide. And it bears a message that must be heard: we can never let our guard down. We can never forgive or forget the suffering of all Karnig P­anians, all over the world.That is the responsibility of humanity. It is the responsibility of each and every individual, as well.

I NT ROD UCT ION

Keith David Watenpaugh

The problems of the Middle East today are in many ways a legacy of the events and the aftermath of World War I, which raged a century ago. The lasting memory of that war in Europe is the brutality and butchery on the Western Front, with its networks of muddy trenches adorned with razor wire; the war in the Middle East is not remembered for its pitched battles, but rather for the unremitting atrocity that left in its wake the destruction of entire communities and peoples, including the genocide of the ethnic Armenian citizens of the Ottoman state.

Karnig Panian’s memoir draws us into the landscape of inhumanity that was the war in the Middle East. It unfolds against the deportation of his family as part of a campaign by the Ottoman state to destroy the community of Ottoman Armenians using the exigent circumstance of the war. This included the forced internal displacement of Panian and most of his family to an ill-supplied concentration camp just outside the city of Hama as Greater Syria (today’s Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel) itself was beset by a famine. Though blamed on successive waves of swarming ­locusts, that famine was created instead by the state’s war effort and a lack of concern for civilian welfare. Just like the Great Leap Forward in China, it wasn’t created by a natural disaster. Using the cover of the war, the Ottoman state took Panian and sought to annihilate his identity while it killed his

family. And though the Ottoman state lost the war, the successor state, the ultranationalist Republic of Turkey, prevented him from returning home or certainly achieving any justice for what he had lost.

Although the role of World War I in shaping European culture and society has been the subject of scholarship for many years, only recently has the war’s impact on the social history of the Middle East attracted much attention. This important turn toward the social history of the war— telling the story of children like Karnig Panian—has been the result of better access to archives and new historical techniques drawn from the study of gender, ethnicity, and the environment, but also of a commitment among younger scholars to bring the memoirs, art, music, journalism, and literature created by the Ottoman state’s minorities—Greeks, Jews, Armenians,­ and Kurds—into the story of the war, which has been dominated by a focus on the nationalist narratives of the dominant Arab and Turkish communities.

This new approach has given us a much richer vision of the history of World War I in the Middle East, but also a deeper understanding of the enormity of the human cost of the conflict. It tells us that as the Ottoman state sought to regain its position in the Middle East and push back the armies of the British, French, and Russian empires, it embraced ideologies, policies, and systemic and structural violence that brought immense harm to its civilian populations, primarily those seen as possible impediments to the unity of the state and the dominance of the Turkish-speaking Sunni Muslim elite.

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The genocide of the Ottoman Armenians (1915–1922), the first of the twentieth century’s many genocides, took place in this crucible of wartime ideology and violence. Armenians were concentrated in several Eastern Anatolian provinces, where many worked farms or lived in villages and small cities. Still, they constituted a significant religious and linguistic minority throughout the Ottoman state and were woven into the fabric of Ottoman society as bureaucrats, intellectuals, artists, and businessmen. During the genocide entire villages, cities, and regions were ­emptied of