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

other regions are entirely populated with Armenians who escaped massacres in urban and rural areasof Van, Bitlis, Sasoun, Moush, Alashkert. Yerevan districts of Aresh, Zeitun, Sebastia, Butanya and Malatiaare populated by people that escaped from the similarly named towns in Turkey and moved to Armeniain the forties and the sixties. For these neighborhoods the past is not only a topic for memories,but also a part of present life, because people with mixed cognation, grandsons and granddaughters ofaunts and uncles, former fellow townsmen and villagers, former friends’ descendants of second andthird generations continue to find each other and the past, even if it is partly mythologized, “return” topresent life together with the burdens of years past: current Armenian-English-Arabic-Spanish vernacularis sometimes full of Turkish or Kurdish words. As an inheritance from Turkish or Kurdish speakingparents there is still a generation that understands these languages, part of this generation learned thelanguages of countries where they moved to, but not Armenian, and when they meet each other, Turkish,not Armenian, becomes the language of conversation, which they use to speak about their present,or to tell stories about their lives, full of memories of shared victims, or “verbal silence», when they cannotfind common language carrier. These meetings are full of anxieties and new memories about thedestinies of certain people: (”I saw your aunt in the year ...., in Australia, she survived...”, “...my fathermet the sister of your grandmother in 1920 in Ardvin, when he was leaving the city, she was married tosome Turk...”, “your uncle had also survived, when he was five years old he was left in Dayr az-Zawr in alocal Arab’s marquee. I saw him, he became an old Arab, a real Muslim, but he still remembers the past.He even remembered your father’s name. When I told him that his father had survived and had storesand children in Aleppo, he showed no interest”), and listeners often become obsessed with the desire tofind their distant relatives. Our respondents told us numerous similar stories. Some people of our generationsometimes get more information about their parents, when they find their missing , because oftentheir parents do not want to share their tragic histories, (this is how Aida Topuzyan, born in Beirut92Aida Topuzyan, born in Beirutto parents from Adabazar andMersin recalls the story of herfather’s aunt.