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The Armenian Reporter | March 28, 2009 3
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Grigoris Balakian’s Armenian Genocide memoir Armenian Golgotha to
appear in English April 2
NEW YORK – “Of all the Christian
minorities of the East, we Armenians
are to blame for our fate.
For although we are an alert nation,
we believed in the Europeans’
professed struggle for justice and
rights, in their false words and deceptions.
Our exemplary stupidity
was a simplemindedness peculiar
to peasants: we did not realize
that on the scales of justice, the
oil deposits of Mosul would weigh
more than the lives of millions of
Christians.” On April 24, 1915, the
author of these words, Fr. Grigoris
Balakian, was arrested along
with some 250 other intellectuals
and leaders of Constantinople’s
Armenian community. During
the next four years, he bore witness
to the countless deportation
caravans of Armenians, tortured,
raped, or slaughtered and subsequently
mutilated on their way to
death in the Syrian deserts; heard
the testimony of many survivors,
foreign witnesses, and Turkish
officials involved in the extermination
campaign; and also came
Cover of Armenian Golgotha .
to know of some brave, righteous
Turks and their German allies
who resisted secret extermination
orders.
Miraculously, Balakian managed
to escape – through forest
and over mountain, disguised as,
among other things, a railroad
worker and then a German soldier.
By September 1918, determined
to testify to the “great crime,” he
was already at work on a dramatic
and comprehensive memoir. “One
after another the bloody episodes
of the thorny Armenian Golgotha
moved across my mind,” he wrote.
“We were still living in a time of annihilation
and terror.”
The first volume of Armenian
Golgotha was published in 1922 by
the Armenian Mekhitarist press of
Vienna; the second, found among
his sister’s papers after her death
in 1956, was published in Paris
three years later with the aid of
the Armenian General Benevolent
Union.
Searing in its detail, Balakian’s
analysis of the Turkish government’s
organized plan to annihilate
the Armenians spurred the
young Vahakn Dadrian to devote
himself to research on the Armenian
Genocide. Armenian Golgotha
“shook me to the foundations of
my being,” he recalled in a 2005
interview with the Armenian Reporter.
“The graphic description
of the fiendish atrocities overwhelmed
me. That became a turning
point in my academic career,”
added Prof. Dadrian, now Director
of Genocide Research at the Zoryan
Institute.
Grigoris Balakian, who became
bishop of the Armenian Apostolic
Church in southern France, died in
Marseilles in 1934. His great nephew,
the poet and memoirist Peter
Balakian, first learned about Armenian
Golgotha in 1991 through a
chain of circumstances he describes
in his prize-winning memoir Black
Dog of Fate (now reissued in a 10th
anniversary edition).
After a ten-year project of translating
and editing this memoir
with former Armenian Reporter
managing editor Aris Sevag, Peter
Balakian has brought Armenian
Golgotha into an English edition
to be published by Knopf on April
2. “It has been a particularly poignant
and rich experience for me
to bring [Grigoris Balakian’s] book
into print in English, eighty-seven
years after its initial publication,”
Peter Balakian writes in the preface.
Elie Wiesel found Armenian
Golgotha a “heartbreaking book”;
Sir Martin Gilbert calls it “a story
that needs to be known.”
“The translation and publication
of Armenian Golgotha in English is
long overdue,” states Deborah E.
Lipstadt, author of Denying the
Holocaust. “It constitutes a thundering
historical proof that those
who deny the Armenian Genocide
are engaged in a massive deception.”
“This book will become a classic,”
predicts Robert Jay Lifton,
author of The Nazi Doctors,” both
for its depiction of a much denied
genocide and for its humane and
brilliant witness to what human beings
can endure and overcome.”
connect:
randomhouse.com/knopf/catalog/dis-
play.pperl?isbn=97803072628821-212-
572-2151
A conversation with Peter Balakian on Armenian Golgotha
NEW YORK – Q: Bishop Grigoris
Balakian is your great uncle.
How did you come to find out about
him and his memoir? Peter Balakian:
Growing up, I knew he was
a Bishop in the Armenian church.
He was spoken of occasionally by
my father and aunts. Although
they mentioned some books he
wrote about the Armenian church,
no one ever mentioned this great
memoir. And what’s odd is that
both my aunts were literary critics
and my father was also a serious
student of history, but they didn’t
mention this book. I know the subject
of the fate of the Armenians
in 1915 traumatized them, and so
all was silence when it came to this
subject. I wrote about my discovery
of my great uncle in a chapter of my
own memoir, Black Dog of Fate . So
my memoir led to my finding his
memoir. It’s become a sort of dialogue
both within the family and
about this history.
Q: How did you find out about
Armenian Golgotha?
PB: It was coincidental, or fated
if you will. In 1991 a friend of mine
sent me a French magazine article
about a commemorative service
for him. He had been the Bishop
in Marseilles at the end of his life.
And the article mentioned this “extraordinary
memoir about the Armenian
Genocide.” Immediately I
ordered the book from Beirut – it’s
still in print in the original Armenian.
And by 1999 I was working
with a co-translator. The project
has taken 10 years.
Q: What was the process of
translating the memoir like?
PB: For me it’s been a moving
and complex journey to discover
my great uncle’s survivor story, his
language and his life. The translation
was a collaborative process,
and it has been slow and painstaking.
Trying to find the right idioms,
and words, rhythms, and sounds
for this rich Armenian language in
contemporary English was an endless
challenge. And this is a book of
71 chapters of pretty dark stuff.
Q: How has your uncle come to
life for you?
A: I had no idea my uncle was
such a dynamic leader and prominent
intellectual of his generation.
Armenian Golgotha brings to life
the extraordinary creativity, wit,
humanity, and compassion this
young Armenian clergyman exhibited
in the face of overwhelming
odds. His ability to negotiate with
Turkish perpetrators and still provide
sustenance to his emaciated
group of fellow deportees is remarkable.
And throughout the story
he remains humble and focused
on helping others. As a clergyman,
he’s anguished both by the human
suffering he is witnessing and by
the destruction of his culture, the
culture of which he is a guardian
and protector. His witnessing is
compound witnessing in this way.
Q: What kind of contribution
does Armenian Golgotha make to
our understanding of the Armenian
Genocide?
PB: It’s an essential text. There is
no text about the Genocide that’s
as rich, layered, and complex as
this. It brings us closer to the century’s
first genocide than any other
first-person account that I know
of. Balakian was one of the famous
250 Armenian cultural leaders who
were arrested on the night of April
14, 1915, at the very start of the
genocide. He survived nearly four
years on deportation marches and
witnessed things that few survivors
have described.
Q: How did he witness more
than others?
I wrote about my
discovery of my great
uncle in a chapter
of my own memoir,
Black Dog of Fate . So
my memoir led to my
finding his memoir.
It’s become a sort of
dialogue both within
the family and about
this history.
PB: He was in a unique position
as a priest because Armenian
deportees looked to him for help,
and for several months he led more
than a hundred deportees through
horrendous conditions. Along the
way, he encountered survivors
from other parts of Turkey and
they told him stories of the massacres
they had witnessed. Also,
Turkish perpetrators, thinking he
was on his way to death, opened up
to him and told him some extraordinary
things. And, the German,
Swiss, and Austrian railway engineers
told him their accounts of
witnessing atrocities. He traveled
hundreds of miles and witnessed
the ruins and remains of many destroyed
Armenian villages, towns,
and cities.
Q: Could you say more about the
destruction of Armenian culture
and its artifacts and infrastructure?
PB: Yes, that’s an important part
of the process of genocide. Raphael
Lemkin, the Polish legal scholar
who created the concept of genocide
as an international crime, underscored
the fact that genocide involves
not only the killing of people
but also the destruction of a people’s
cultural institutions, language,
art and artifacts, religion, and so
on. In the case of the Armenian
Genocide, the Turkish government
destroyed more than 5,000 Armenian
churches and schools as well
as thousands of other buildings,
artifacts, works of art and literature.
Balakian also shows us what
Peter Balakian.
happened to Armenians who were
forceably converted to Islam from
their Christian faith. It’s astonishing
to read how intensely Grigoris
Balakian bears witness to this kind
of destruction on his deportation
and escape.
Q: What does Balakian’s memoir
show us about this event as an act
of genocide?
PB: Readers will find that Armenian
Golgotha corroborates what
most of the scholarship has shown.
The deportations and massacres of
the Armenians were planned by
the central government; he shows
us how the Turkish government
used surveillance, created blacklists
to arrest the cultural leaders,
created killing squads, created false
provocations in order to arrest Armenians,
and so on. Chapter 11 is a
blueprint of the genocidal process.
Q: Why is the Armenian Genocide
important to study today? After
all, it happened almost 95 years
ago.
PB: Well, the Armenian Genocide
is the template for all genocide
to follow in the modern era. It began
what you might call the age of
modern genocide. It was the first
instance in which a nation state
used its military, bureaucracy, and
technology to exterminate a target
group of people in a concentrated
period of time. More than a million
people were killed in a year. Hitler
was inspired by the Armenian
Genocide; he saw you could get rid
of a hated ethnic group that way,
and he said in August 1939, “Who
today, after all, speaks of the annihilation
of the Armenians?”
Secondly, Raphael Lemkin, the
man who developed the concept
of genocide, did so in large part on
the basis of what happened to the
Armenians in 1915. The Armenian
Genocide is part of the genesis of
the very word.
Third, the Turkish government’s
continuous denial of the genocide
is a dangerous example for those
who would commit genocide today.
Q: Why does the Turkish government
deny the Armenian Genocide
today?
PB: It’s a complex issue and I
would point to a few salient factors.
Turkey has been socialized
since its founding as a modern republic
by certain taboos, and one
of them concerns the disappearance
of the Armenians. Turks have
been taught that there were once
Armenians in Turkey and that
they were a “disloyal people” and
whatever happened to them was
their own fault. At the same time,
any real history of the Armenians
has been disallowed in Turkey, and
Turkish people have not been free
to critique their own society and
its history. If you disallow critical
inquiry of your country, you end
up creating denialist narratives
about history.
Q: But, why is Turkey so aggressively
trying to censor the
truth about this history around
the world? It seems excessive, and
counterproductive for Turkey, especially
if it wants to join the European
Union.
PB: Most informed people
would agree that the Turkish denialist
campaign sets Turkey back;
it casts a shadow over the whole
society and it shows Europe, for
example, that Turkey is not a
truly democratic nation, even
though it has a parliament. A society
that puts its best intellectuals
like its Nobel Laureate Orhan
Pamuk on trial for acknowledging
the Armenian Genocide is not yet
a democracy.