Marian Mesrobian Mac Curdy
For the first six years of my life, my parents, brother and I lived
in my maternal grandparents’ house in Syracuse, N.Y. The six of us were
crammed into a small early 20th-century frame house, with a
front porch and tiny back study that served as my bedroom; an enticingly
flat roof outside its window overlooked our grape arbor, fruit trees,
and strawberry patch where my grandmother caught the thieving bunny she
spanked and sent on its way. Our home welcomed many a visiting
dignitary. As a small child I sat on the lap of family friend, Hamo
Paraghamian, a huge man with a heart to match. My small hands carried a
bowl of yogurt and garlic for General Dro sitting in the blue chair in
the corner of our living room, who thanked me by intoning in his gruff
voice, “This is food for the gods.”
Aaron Sachaklian (in Armenian, Aharon), my grandfather, spent most of
his days in the red leather chair near the wooden radio he listened to
every day, silently smoking his Camels with shaking fingers, perhaps
from undiagnosed Parkinson’s that would, years later, steal my mother’s
smile and cause her shuffling gait. But when I was three, four, five,
this quiet man who wore a three-piece suit nearly every day of his life,
who had private sessions with visiting community leaders and battle
heroes, bounced me on his foreleg, carried me through the doorways on
his shoulders like a queen, and took me outside at dusk to survey the
peach, pear, and apple trees beyond our back door. When my grandmother
Eliza and I made our weekly trip to Abajian Cleaners three blocks down
on South Avenue, I was the one to carry his wool coat, hugging it to my
chest, saying, “I love my medz-hairig [grandfather]. I wish he would live forever.”
My four grandparents were survivors of the Armenian massacres that
occurred before the genocide of 1915. My maternal grandmother, Eliza,
survived both the Hamidian massacres of 1894-96 and the Adana Massacres
of 1909, the first because they hid on the roof, and the second because
they were able to fight back when the Turks held the town under siege,
holding them off long enough for foreign consuls to intervene. The city
of Dortyol was saved, but her brother, Mihran, one of the leaders of the
resistance—who snuck past Turkish guns to break up the dam the Turks
had built in the creek that supplied the town’s water—was imprisoned.
When asked why he resisted, he said, “Even a dumb animal will try to
protect itself.” As my grandmother wrote in her memoirs, “They silenced
him with their beatings.” My grandmother said her mother washed Mihran’s
bloody underwear sent home by his jailers with her tears. When my
grandmother exhorted me to eat every last pea on my plate, saying,
“Remember the starving Armenians,” it had more than rhetorical power. I
was raised on my grandmother’s stories of resistance, but my grandfather
never spoke of those days, and I, unconsciously respecting his silence,
never asked.
In 1990, my family found a large collection of letters in my
grandfather’s upstairs study, the room I slept in as a child, the one
that overlooked the grape arbor that Aaron had built. The letters were
written by Armen Garo, Shahan Natalie, Soghomon Tehlirian, Hamo
Paraghamian, Vahan Zakariants, and others involved in Operation Nemesis.
After the war, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) created
lists of perpetrators that they gave to the Allies. When the tribunals
and courts martial failed to secure justice for the Armenians, they
decided to use those lists themselves. At the 1919 World Congress of the
ARF, a secret resolution called “Haduk Kordz” (Special
Mission) was adopted to seek justice; each regional central committee
would be accountable to the congress for its own actions. That allowed
the Central Committee of America to assume responsibility for this
operation, which they did. These men must have seen Aaron’s study as the
safest place for the letters, and indeed he never spoke of them or what
they contained to anyone in his family, including his wife.
My mother, knowing immediately what she had discovered in her
father’s files, took the letters to her house, boxed, catalogued, and
summarized them (for which I am thankful to this day), and placed them
on the cement floor in her basement where they were inundated by two
floods. Her mother’s memoirs were safely stored in her second-floor
study, but these letters, perhaps seen as too radioactive to be allowed
upstairs, sat in the damp basement, their contents neatly labeled,
waiting for the next flood to wipe out the faint ink. She told me of
them with an ounce of pride and three ounces of wonder, but she had no
idea what to do with them. Her father was the community’s patriarch, the
one called on to calm the hotheads and quiet the querulous.
I realized that these letters, along with her Armenian book
collection and artifacts, such as her grandmother’s handwork and the
bloody sash taken off Mihran’s dead body after the Turks killed him in
1921, would be left for me to deal with. By the time I pulled the
letters out of the basement, some were still damp, others dry but with
running ink, and others, thankfully, unscathed. With shaking hands I
opened up alternately damp or crackling pages one by one, laid them on
the kitchen table, and let the sunlight they had not seen in close to 88
years dry them out.
My cousin Arsine Oshagan offered her translation talent, and we heard
the voices of these extraordinary men that demonstrated poignantly and
powerfully the danger, difficulty, and significance of this work. To
give some idea of the secrecy involved, one of the letters is in code;
it reads like gibberish, but when a cut-out template is placed on top of
the letter, the actual message can be read, one most likely written by
Soghomon Tehlirian, using one of his aliases. Between 1920 and 1922, at
least eight perpetrators were killed, including Talaat Pasha, the
“number one nation murderer” as Shahan Natalie called him.
The three leaders of Operation Nemesis were Armen Garo, the soul of
Nemesis, and Armenian ambassador to the United States; Shahan Natalie,
the heart, and coordinator of operations, whose intensity and fervor are
imprinted onto every page he wrote; and Aaron Sachaklian, the head, and
finance officer and logistician, who figured out how to fund and
organize this massive effort and keep the pieces from coming unglued.
The three described their project as “a sacred work of justice.” In my
grandfather’s file I found the list of 100 perpetrators on the ARF “hit”
list that was written in Natalie’s handwriting, as well as close to 65
photographs of Ottoman-Turkish leaders, including at least 13 from the
list of 100. These photographs were sent on to the assassins in the
field to ensure that the right target was hit. The prime directive for
Operation Nemesis was injure no innocent people, and this was followed,
even if it meant aborting an attempt.
I could understand my mother’s reticence regarding what to do with
these Nemesis materials: We are not prepared for such revelations. But I
was also fascinated by exactly that point: How did it happen that my
quiet, careful, controlled, and gentle grandfather was a leader of a
plot to assassinate anyone, even these mass murderers? When I
misbehaved, the worst he ever did was to squeeze my arm. How could his
family, his wife, daughters, and son know nothing? As small children
they played under the dining room table where these men met and planned.
But of course silence was crucial. In 1921, immediately after Tehlirian
killed Talaat, the police began looking for Tehlirian’s colleagues,
anyone who might have provided assistance. They could not imagine that
this sickly young man who barely spoke a word of German could really be
in Berlin to study the German language. But no accomplices were found
and the defense attorney was able to sustain the fiction that this was
not a premeditated murder; the Germans did not work very hard to topple
this concept.
Victor Frankl, who survived a Nazi concentration camp, argued that
free will appears to enable those who have suffered trauma feel less
like victims. The Armenian Genocide was, of course, designed to destroy
the Armenians’ personal agency, and the fall of the independent Republic
of Armenia removed their political agency. However, the men of Nemesis
created a narrative of resistance and justice that provided a measure of
pride to the Armenians in the dark days of 1921. After the trial, Vahan
Zakariants, who testified at the trial and was the operative Vaza who
ascertained that Talaat was indeed living at 4 Hardenbergstrasse, wrote a
letter published in Sacred Justice (*) describing the day Tehlirian was acquitted; it showed Tehlirian’s nearly rock-star status at that time:
The whole courtroom had become silent. … Several hundred eyes were
directed to the foreman of the jury, and to the written paper in his
hand. … [The foreman] very definitive and loud intones, “Nein”
[No]. Immediately the courtroom explodes in applause, and silence. I
translate that; Soghomon quietly asks, “What are they saying and what
does that mean?” “That means, you are free,” I answer. … Everyone
exploded; Armenian, German, woman, and girl like a torrent are running
toward the cage where Soghomon is and crying, joyous, hugging each
other. … Some people are kissing his hand, some his forehead, former
landlady is crying; you’d think that she was his mother…”
The trial transcripts were printed and sold many a copy during a time when immigrants had little money to spare.
When I was a small child, our social life was organized around
Armenian events. Elderly ladies, dressed in black, who did not dance or
laugh, whose signature action was to wring their hands as they echoed
the “vakh vakh” that so defined them, were part of our
landscape. As a child, I was both drawn to these women and shrank from
them. I knew they lived in an inner world that I did not want to know.
As children, we absorbed the meaning of the words “vakh vakh” without being told the phrase means “what a shame, what a pity.” But I did not know then that vakh
in Armenian means “fear.” We children feared these women because we
knew instinctively that we could become them. The effects of genocide do
not disappear by an act of will. While research has shown that
three-quarters of Armenian survivors interviewed asserted that they did
not talk to anyone about their experiences of the genocide for fear of
persecution and to protect their children, helplessness and silence can
exacerbate the effects of trauma, which children can sense. In addition,
epigenetics—genetic changes in response to life events—as well as
experiences may affect our behavior, and perhaps that of our children.
Perpetrators as well as victims may be affected by these problematic
epigenetic changes. We are left with the unsettling premise that not
only the sins of the fathers—but their responses from being sinned
against—may be visited upon their children. If so, this means that the
genocide is still happening—to both perpetrators and their victims.
On Jan. 13, I attended a lecture in Cambridge, Mass., given by the
noted Turkish scholar Taner Akcam, who talked about documenting the
effort in Aleppo immediately after the genocide to rescue Armenian women
and children, a project he is translating into Turkish. After the
lecture, he was asked why he does this difficult work. He talked of his
family’s dedication to supporting human rights in Turkey and the prison
terms that generated. He spoke of his brother’s jailors sending home his
bloody underwear to his mother. Turk or Armenian, bloody underwear is
the same. Let us hope in this year of the Centennial that the door to
truth and freedom begins to open—for both Armenians and Turks. In the
meantime, we can thank the men of Nemesis that the architects of the
Armenian Genocide did not die in their down beds of old age.
"The Armenian Weekly," February 18, 2015
(*) Marian Mesrobian Mac Curdy, Sacred Justice: The Voices and Legacy of the Armenian Operation Nemesis, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2015.
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