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

We devoured an evening meal of pita bread, cheese, and apricots, and then we headed to the nearby beach, where small waves crashed against the rocks. We watched the little fish swimming in and out of little crevices, and we shrieked with delight as we chased the waves back into the sea.

We were in an area called Karantina, which was right by the water.* Thickets of trees dotted the landscape, and we played under their shade. But our teachers soon ensured that we were not wandering all day, doing nothing at all.

On the third day after our arrival, our teachers gathered groups of students around them and dispersed to different thickets. We didn’t have textbooks yet, so our classes consisted mostly of our teachers’ reading or reciting to us. These were primitive lessons, primarily designed to ensure that we didn’t become accustomed to a life of idleness.

We were excited to learn again. We sat cross-legged in the shade of the trees, in a circle around our teachers. Sometimes we had trouble hearing the lectures, but we did our best to capture every word. We were thirsty for knowledge.

I developed an interest in mathematics, though we still did only addition and subtraction. After language class, as we picked up new words, we all tried to use them during our games. When our teachers recounted the great deeds of the Armenian kings of yore, I thought, “Where are these kings now? How have our people fallen on such hard times?”

We began to forget the terrible days of Antoura and Aintab, yet we wondered whether our good fortune would last. We were afraid we would suddenly wake up and realize it had all been a dream. But every day, we got bread and fresh vegetables, and sometimes meat. The terror of hunger was becoming only a memory.

We grew fascinated by the sea. The teachers promised to teach us how to swim, and on the first afternoon that we went to the beach, many of the older boys stripped and headed right into the water. I couldn’t understand

*La Quarantaine, colloquially referred to as Karantina, is the site of a quarantine station for travelers built in the early nineteenth century. It is in northeastern Beirut, adjacent to the port of Beirut and west of the Beirut River.

why they didn’t sink. The younger orphans stayed near the beach, wetting their feet in the crashing waves. The teachers went from one to the other, encouraging them all to venture into the water.

An older boy helped me by carrying me into the sea. At first, I panicked. A few times, I sank like lead, swallowing water as I opened my mouth in terror. But slowly I got accustomed to it. Within a week or two, I was swimming like a fish.

I saw a complete transformation in us. Thanks to the exhortations of Mr. Travis and the faculty, even the most fearful of us had gone into the sea and overcome our anxiety. Everyone was now having fun, splashing around and exploring their newfound mastery over the waters.

Two weeks passed, and we were still living in the tents, eating and learning and swimming. Some new teachers joined us, raising the number of the faculty to fifteen. Each teacher had to teach only one or two subjects, though still with primitive supplies and without books.

We now had dedicated timeslots for calisthenics and military drills. Calisthenics was taught by Mr. Kopernik, while our drill instructor was Mr. Stepan. The latter seemed to think that we were really soldiers, and he would bark out martial orders in both Armenian and French. When one of us made a mistake during his classes, Mr. Stepan would lash out at the guilty boy with rage.

The boys were terrified of Mr. Stepan, but at the same time we respected him, and even loved him. He was an odd man. Other teachers retired to their quarters to rest, but he spent all of his free time with the older boys. He gathered the teenagers around him, narrating his past adventures. He was almost one of the orphans himself, though his wild, brutal gaze set him apart.

The teachers’ passion for their work and their love for us were obvious. Many had been with us since the end of our time in Antoura, and they stayed with us through Aintab and Beirut. They had basically become our surrogate parents, and we treated them as such. Under these tents, we had built a large family together, as cohesive and happy as any in the world, despite the trauma we had collectively endured.

We often spoke of the past. The previous five years had been imprinted

1 8 4 C H A P T E R 9

I had to wait for the fourth and final trip to climb aboard. Eventually, we arrived at some ancient ruins in a small village.

“We’ve arrived. This is Jbeil!” announced the driver. “Look down toward the beach! See? That’s where your new home will be.”We entered the village, reached its square, and then made a sharp turn, heading toward the beach. Finally, we came to a halt and climbed down. Those who had arrived before us were waiting in a courtyard, whiling away the time with games.

There were more than three hundred boys. Facing us was a large facility with two buildings. One was a solid, imposing two-story structure. The other was smaller, with eight or ten windows, though some of the panes were broken. Portions of the roof were also missing.

We were spending the night in this smaller building. The bedrolls were immediately unrolled on the cold ground. “Don’t worry, boys, tomorrow we’ll arrange for everything. All will be settled soon,” said one of our teachers.

The sun dipped into the sea, and after a small dinner of bread and cheese we went back outside. We walked along a small path lined with trees. Their branches grew in interlocked patterns, forming strange knots. Up the path, we found still more ruins, dotting the valley all the way down to the water. In the dark, they looked eerie and mysterious.

I stood in the twilight near those ruins and reflected on my journey. We had come to a new country, and we would again start from scratch. But we had everything necessary to survive, and we would continue to receive our education. Now, we had to work as hard as possible to rebuild our shattered lives.

AF T ERWORD

Keith David Watenpaugh

Karnig Panian’s return from Aintab to Lebanon under the French Man- date—and yet another orphanage—marked not just a critical turning point in his own life but in the larger international drive to help Armenians repair their lives and community in the wake of genocide. The American Red Cross had turned Panian’s care over to Near East Relief (NER), a massive American nongovernmental aid organization that had taken the lead in addressing Armenian suffering.* NER brought together an older generation of American Protestant missionaries in the Middle East with Progressive-era Americans who had come of age during the Great War. The organization had set for itself the ambitious task of reforming the entire region—an idea encapsulated in the title of its journal, The New Near East.

Armenian genocide survivors were at the center of this effort. During the war, the cause of the Armenians had been popular in the United States and NER had raised funds for immediate relief, but after the war was over, it had planned to resettle Armenian refugees in Anatolia, in particular in those parts occupied by France. The organization sent orphans and other survivors from Syria and Lebanon to the cities of Aintab, Urfa, Marash, and Adana. However,

*See my Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); James L. Barton, The Story of Near East Relief: An Interpretation (1915–1930) (New York: Macmillan, 1930).

NER had not anticipated the ferocity of the Turkish nationalist opposition to both the French occupation and the return of the Armenians, and a terrible, multi-sided civil war soon engulfed all of Anatolia (1919–1923). What Panian witnessed in Aintab was reproduced elsewhere, such as the city of Marash, where civil violence led to the massacre of 12,000 Armenians in 1920.

As Panian and other Armenians fled the war in Anatolia, they faced a very uncertain future. They were an overwhelmingly young and female stateless people in a land where the majority of the inhabitants spoke a different language—Arabic—and were generally hostile to their presence. As seen in Panian’s own recollection, NER officials such as Ray Travis, who is unique in the history of that organization in that he had fought to defend the Armenians of Aintab, and Stanley E. Kerr, who had worked with the Armenians of Marash, remained with the twice-displaced community as it took shape around Beirut and Aleppo.* NER established orphanages, schools, and hospitals for the displaced; it embarked on cooperative lending programs to aid in the purchase of land and the building of homes. Often, as in the case of the orphanage at Jbeil, where Panian lived until he was 15, orphans and other Armenian refugees themselves worked to build these new NER facilities—a fact he recalled with great pride later in life.

NER identified young survivors who were especially bright, like Panian, Antranik Zaroukian (1913–1989), also from Gurin, and Asdghig Avakian, an orphan from the Anatolia village of Körpe, and promoted their education, shaping them for community leadership. Avakian became a leading nurse-educator at the American University Hospital in Beirut and wrote an English-language memoir about her life as a child survivor, A Stranger among Friends (1960).† Zaroukian’s Men Without Childhood (1985)‡ details his at times hilarious, at times sorrowful life in an NER orphanage in Aleppo before he went on to a career as a journalist and poet.

*Stanley E. Kerr, The Lions of Marash: Personal Experiences with American Near East Relief, 1919– 1922 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975).

†A Stranger among Friends: An Armenian Nurse from Lebanon Tells Her Story (Beirut: Catholic Press, 1960).

‡Mankut′iwn ch′unets′ogh mardik (Beiruit: Matenashar “Hamazgayin,” 1955), translated by Elise Bayizian and Marzbed Margossian as Men Without Childhood (New York: Ashod Press, 1985).

Each was successful as an adult, evidence again of the resilient potential of children in the face of genocide. Yet they all tell of other young people who fell along the way and the immense burden they felt they carried as among the last of their natal families. Their surviving family and friends all remember how they periodically suffered under the weight of their memory of what had happened to them as children, and how they fought through that pain.

Of the three, Avakian had the most contact with Americans and American institutions throughout her life. Indeed, she is an example of the real impact of the NER’s project of making a “New Near East”: instead of making new Middle Easterners, NER helped make Armenians who were both modern but still “out of place” in the societies where they found refuge. She did not emigrate, though thousands of others in situations similar to hers found assimilation in Syria and Lebanon untenable, and their transition to Western society made smoother by the education and training provided by NER. Panian and Zaroukian, though they too remained in Beirut, wrote exclusively in Armenian and became part of an autonomous, or perhaps more correctly ghettoized, Armenian community in the logic of the sectarian régime of independent Lebanon.*

Panian was instrumental in the revival of that community. Though he was originally trained as an electrician, the love of books and reading and the flair for teaching he first demonstrated at the orphanage in Aintab led him back to school. Later, he became a beloved teacher at the Beirut D­jemaran, the premier Armenian education institution in the Middle East. Yet, the refugee Armenian communities in Lebanon and Syria are dying and with them the unique culture of Anatolia’s Armenians. Since the genocide, Armenian emigration to the Western Hemisphere, Europe, and what was Soviet ­Armenia has been constant, but with the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon in 1975, the movement of Armenians became a flood. Beyond the violence and uncertainty of that war, general economic collapse, discrimination,­ and

*On the emergence of a new Armenian intellectual community in diaspora, see Nicola Migliorino, (Re)Constructing Armenia in Lebanon and Syria: Ethno-Cultural Diversity and the State in the Aftermath of a Refugee Crisis (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 123.

a relative lack of professional opportunities in the Middle East spurred the exodus. Most of Panian’s descendants have left the region, as have many of the graduates of the Djemaran itself. And while a small community of Armenians might remain in Lebanon for the foreseeable future, the once immense Armenian community of Aleppo, Syria, which had numbered over 150,000, has now dwindled as a result of Syria’s civil war (2011–present) to perhaps fewer than 20,000; many observers believe that a tipping point has been reached and it is no longer viable. At the time of this writing, the extremist Islamist organization, the Islamic State (IS), is poised to capture the city. In places such as Mosul, Raqqa, and Deir al-Zor, the IS has placed severe restrictions on non-Muslims and destroyed important Armenian churches and memorials. There is no reason to doubt that the same would befall Aleppo. Regardless, there just isn’t the critical mass of Armenians needed to support institutions like schools, newspapers, and churches that helped preserve the Western Armenian language and way of life of the pregenocide community in diaspora, and it is only a matter of time before the community Panian helped rebuild dissolves completely in the face of hate, violence, and lack of educational and professional opportunities.

Goodbye, Antoura is an artifact of that community as it faced destruction and then struggled to survive nearly a century ago. But it is also a reminder of how inexorable the process of genocide is once embarked upon by a powerful state and thus how strong the imperative to prevent and punish genocide must be. The cruel project set in motion by men like Jemal Pasha and abetted by Halide Edip continues to exact a terrible price from the children and grandchildren of genocide.

ACKNOWLED GMENTS

Houry Panian Boyamian

I remember my father as a man not only of great integrity, conviction, and discipline, but also of tremendous optimism and faith. Like so many others who lost their childhoods to great tragedy, he cherished what he had in life, and he committed himself to making that life better. My sister and I grew up feeling his immense love for his children, wife, friends, students, and mentors. But his love for his mother had a special place in his heart, and he honored her memory by dedicating his life to Armenian culture, language, and heritage.

My father did not often talk about his tragic past, but he wrote relentlessly. Besides this memoir of the genocide and the orphanage at Antoura, he wrote about his later experience at the orphanage in Jbeil, about his mentors Levon Shant and Nigol Aghpalian, and about his experiences with the Hamazkayin Armenian Educational and Cultural Society and with Djemaran, the Armenian Lyceum, based in Beirut. He gathered and edited Nigol Aghplian’s manuscripts and presided over their publication. He knew how important it was that the world knew about his generation’s experiences. He wanted to pass on these stories to those who would follow in his footsteps.

Every April, when the Armenian world commemorated the genocide, he sank into a kind of depression. These may have been the only times that

he allowed himself to remember and relive the pain of those years. He died in 1989.

The original manuscript of my father’s memoir, which was written in Armenian, was published in 1992. It was published both by the ­Hamazkayin Armenian Educational and Cultural Society in Beirut, Lebanon, and by the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia in Antelias, Lebanon.

On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, my sister, Chaghik Apelian, and I felt a deep obligation to introduce my father’s memoir to a wider audience. We hoped to honor the memory of my father and his fellow orphans; to prevent, in our own way, future injustices; and to contribute to the demand for reparations. Therefore, we decided to have the Armenian version translated into English.

I would like to express my gratitude to various people who contributed to the realization of this project. My deep thanks to Khatchig Mouradian, who offered valuable advice as we planned the English translation; Simon Beugekian, who translated the entire manuscript efficiently, thoroughly, and faithfully; Vahe Habeshian, who suggested revisions and wrote explanatory footnotes; Missak Kelechian, who provided photographs of the Antoura orphanage; and Garo Derounian, who provided photographs of the Millet Khan orphanage in Aintab.

I am also grateful to a host of scholars who championed this project. Richard Hovannisian attested to the importance of this memoir, and V­ artan Gregorian wrote a heartfelt foreword to the book. Aram Goudsouzian read and edited the initial draft prior to its submission to Stanford University Press, and he provided a thorough revision before its publication. Keith David Watenpaugh was an outstanding advocate for the book, and his introduction and afterword artfully provide the necessary historical context on the Great War and the Armenian Genocide. Kate Wahl, editor-in-chief of Stanford University Press, offered guidance and support throughout the publication process.

Karnig Panian’s legacy lives on in the younger generations, including his grandchildren, Annie, Taline, Steve, Haig, and Alik, and his great-grand- children, Alex, Amelia, Julia, Kyle, and Peter—as well as at least one more