Forced into Genocide

The following is a review of Forced into Genocide, the memoir of Armenian Genocide survivor Yervant Alexanian.

 The Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, Armenia.
Used under a Creative Commons license. Click photo for further information.

Forced into Genocide is the memoir of a survivor of the Armenian Genocide. His memoir is especially unique in that Alexanian was conscripted into the Ottoman military, the very institution responsible for the genocide. While other Armenian men were also conscripted, few survived.

Yervant Alexanian was born in what is now Sivas, Turkey. At the time, Turkey ruled a vast empire that included the Balkans, parts of the Middle East, and parts of North Africa. The empire was founded in the 14^th century by Osman I, and it derived its name, the Ottoman Empire, from the Arabic form of his name. Alexanian was born during the Hamidian Massacres, which took place between 1894 and 1896. They were a series of atrocities committed by the Ottomans against the empire’s Armenian minority. They are named for the sultan during whose reign they were carried out, Sultan Abdulhamid II. Presumably relying on accounts he had heard growing up, Alexanian writes that during the massacres, his family “…huddled in the upper floor, praying that the violence would soon end—a rather apocalyptic, indescribable scene. These were the first days of my life.” (5) His aunt survived the massacres by playing dead. (6)

Christian denominations competed for converts in the Ottoman Empire through the establishment of schools. Alexanian began his education at an Armenian Protestant school, but when the tuition became too much, he was sent to the tuition-free French Jesuit school. Alexanian was evidently precocious, and when a tuition fee was established at the Jesuit school that Alexanian was unable to pay, the schoolmaster agreed to personally defray much of it. While at the school, Alexanian became an altar boy at the school’s chapel but visited the Armenian Apostolic Church on Christmas and Easter. (23-4) He also learned to play the cornet, and one of the most poignant scenes of Forced into Genocide is when the Ottomans seize the property of the Christian schools during World War I and Alexanian sees a young Turkish boy using the cornet that was once his. (34)

It was at this time, as World War I began, that Alexanian rapidly became cognizant of the discrimination to which Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were subjected. (37) Turks began robbing Armenian stores, and the government began arbitrarily arresting and murdering Armenians, as well as conscripting them. Alexanian had been taught how to sew by his sister-in-law and managed to secure a position as a tailor in a military workshop. (45, 47) Meanwhile, his family was deported along with the rest of Sivas, and the churches and religious schools were taken over and robbed.

Alexanian’s memoir is a window into the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Ottoman world. Though the Ottoman Empire gradually whittled away at the legality of the slave trade, it never quite got around to abolishing slavery, and this reality is manifested, albeit briefly, at the beginning of Alexanian’s memoir. In recounting the ordeal of his aunt, mentioned above, he writes, “Just at this moment, one of the slaves of one of our Turkish neighbors, a black woman named Dado, walked by the house, and witnessing what was happening there, ran home and roused her sleeping master, who was a wealthy landowner.” (7) In 1916, Alexanian rode a train on his way to Istanbul for military training. (71) The late nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries were a period in which the Ottomans were knitting their empire together with railroads, and this was Alexanian’s first time riding a train. Much of the Ottoman railroad system was built by German corporations.

Interestingly, there is little mention of the Young Turks. The Young Turks were the reformist Turkish nationalists who had forced the Sultan to adopt a constitution in 1908. They promoted industrialization and secularization. However, it was also members of the Young Turks movement that directed the Armenian Genocide. A point that Alexanian often reiterates is that the Armenian population was not guilty of the rebelliousness of which it was accused during the genocide. In one instance in which he provides evidence of this, he mentions the 1908 constitution. During the celebration of a Muslim holiday, all the students in Sivas, Christian and Muslim alike, gathered in the town square. The speakers uniformly celebrated the 1908 constitution as representing progress for both Turks and the empire’s minorities. Among those whose speeches celebrated the constitution was a student from the Jesuit school that Alexanian attended. (31)

Alexanian recounts several instances in which Turkish Muslims expressed kindness toward Armenians. The master of Dado, the slave mentioned above, placed Alexanian’s family “…under his personal protection” during the Hamidian Massacres. (7) A Turkish textile shop owner rescued an Armenian man from a mob during the escalation of anti-Armenian violence following the Ottoman Empire’s entry into WWI. (41) And one day during the war, when Alexanian was running errands for his commander and fellow soldiers, an elderly Turkish man let him borrow a bowl, trusting him to return it. “May the men who caused so much misfortune to your people go blind,” the man said. (67)

Alexanian immigrated to the United States in 1920. As such, his memoir is also the story of an immigrant to the United States who escaped the difficulties of the Old World to find security and success in America. In one of the appended letters, Alexanian writes, “One wonders how it is that in this great country called America, everybody gets along regardless of color, nationality, or religion.” (103) It would be easy contradict this statement. Alexanian was establishing himself in a United States characterized by the near-eradication of Native Americans, Jim Crow, and the Red Scare. While many women, particularly in the West, had the right to vote, most women did not, and this right was not guaranteed by the federal constitution until 1920. Alexanian would have been largely insulated from much of this. For him, the relevant contrast was between his life in Turkey and his life in the United States. In Turkey, 51 members of his family were murdered by a government-sponsored campaign of genocide because of their religion. In the United States, he flourished, free to practice his religion and promote the Armenian language. Alexanian was not unaware of the plight of other American minorities, however, and he donated a building in the Bronx to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (90)

Alexanian’s memoir is concise and accessible, but it is also presented with historians in mind. It is translated from Armenian by Simon Beugekian, who provides an informative introduction that discusses the historiographical significance of the memoir. For instance, Alexanian’s is one of only about 200 memoirs of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, and few of those memoirs are of Armenian soldiers who served in the Ottoman military. The memoir is edited by Alexanian’s daughter, Adrienne Alexanian, who provides a dedication. It also has a forward by Israel Charney and an introduction by Sergio La Porta. The book’s several appendices contain many documents from Alexanian’s life. There is a timeline, an index, and a bibliography.

Forced into Genocide begins and ends with the same haunting image of a boy separated from his mother, who is being sent to her death. “The worst day of my life was July 3, 1915, when I watched fifty-one members of my family disappear over the hill,” he writes. (1) In May 1953, Alexanian returned to this experience, writing, “Every year on Mother’s Day my memory goes back to July 3, 1915, the day when my mother kissed my eyes and said ‘goodbye my son, take good care of yourself.’ She was taking the road to forced deportation and starvation and I had to go back to the barracks to perform my military service for the regime that was sending my mother to her forced death with her eyes wide open.” (93)

Yervant Alexanian and Adrienne G. Alexanian (ed.), Forced into Genocide: Memoirs of an Armenian Soldier in the Ottoman Turkish Army (New York: Transaction Publishers, 2017).