Speaking to One Another - The International Raoul Wallenberg ...

“Well, They Are Human Too”Even in those families who had worst memories, they always love to remember and pass over the storiesof support 1 , even though such support wasn’t received by members of their families and they knowabout these cases through a third party.Such is, for example, the following story by Anahit Bardakchyan: “... I visited there as a tourist ... I got acquaintedwith some woman there, her name was Geghuhi, she spoke broken Armenian, and her man (husband)didn’t speak Armenian at all, they arrived from Turkey, from Istanbul or from somewhere... She said, “during thedeportation my father-in-law was a small kid, he was left in the fields during deportation. A Turkish person passingthere said “Oh my, this is the child of our neighbor such and such, they got away and the child is left here, theydidn’t have a chance to take him...” So he takes the child, brings him home; this Turk keeps the boy, keeps him,raises him. The brother of this Turk told him “listen, we raised this boy, it doesn’t matter that he is an Armenianchild, gyavur’s (Turk. unfaithful) child”, he tells, “let us wed him with my daughter, we know this boy very well.”And he had answered “no, I found this child in the fields and I said to myself - I will take him, raise him, raise himas an Armenian, and I will wed him with an Armenian girl”... so, finally, he does so, he weds him to an Armeniangirl, and then he sits and tells him the whole story, so and so. “When I found this child amidst the fields, half-asleep,in tears, miserable, hungry and thirsty, he was trembling. So, I felt pity for him, I said to myself – I shall keep thisone and I shall wed him with an Armenian girl.” And, she said, he wedded him with an Armenian girl and this Geghuhi,she was married to the son of this boy’s son, so this boy was her father-in-law”.In the stories of our narrators the cases of support are usually linked to their memories of survival. Aswe already reported, the memories of support are significantly personalized, and very often, particularnames are remembered. These memories usually end with a generalized conclusion, like: “Well, they arehuman too”.Avetis Keshishian remembers from his father’s memoirs, how their “dost” [Turk. friend] helped his fatherand his brothers. “My parents also told other things about civilians, Turkish ‘not soldiers’ – more humane,more benevolent, amicable and intimate [things]. There have been even cases of ours – they were four brothers –once they got away into the mountains; they didn’t have food, and while the danger was still there, they couldn’tcome back to the village. Sometimes they used to come in the night, one-by-one, to take some water or food. So once,the house of their “dost” – dost means “friend” in Turkish – in one end of our Lapash village there lived some Turk,1 In this research any cases of support provided by Russians, Europeans or Americans are completely omitted since first, thesehave been schematized in the biographies of individuals and whole families and naturally, they are present in memoirsmainly concerning life in orphanages, and secondly, they are not related or at least, narrators do not relate them to “Turkishmemoirs” of Armenians.125