Loss and Legacy—Survivors of the Armenian Genocide Remember by Mihran Dabag and Kristin Platt (review)

Even after one hundred years, the Armenian genocide continues to be a difficult and controversial topic. Turkey's denial of the genocide has had important repercussions for remembrance and historiography broadly, as well as more directly for scholars who write about this atrocity—some publishers' policies stymie discussion of this complex history, forcing researchers to develop novel strategies to get their work into print. More significantly, though, Turkey's state-sponsored denial has continued to victimize the survivors and suppress their individual stories. As Bedross Der Matossian shockingly observed in a recent overview of the historiography ("Explaining the Unexplainable—Recent Trends in the Armenian Genocide Historiography," in "The Armenian Genocide and the World," ed. Stefan Ihrig, special issue, Journal of Levantine Studies 2 [2015]: 143-166), for a long time historians (even Armenian historians) have shunned the testimonies of survivors for fear that their work would appear unacademic: survivor accounts were deemed unreliable and so were largely ignored. With most of the survivors' generation now dead, new oral history projects often focus on the children and grandchildren of the survivors, using next-generation or family memory and identity rather than the genocide itself as a historical and personal event.

In this light, the collection of interviews Mihran Dabag and Kristin Platt published in the hundredth anniversary year of the Armenian genocide is special. For one, these interviews were conducted over two decades ago with some of the last survivors before their passing; for another, these texts exhibit surprising narrative qualities, as discussed below. Dabag and Platt admit in their introduction that they were worried that the effects of the conflict over the acceptance and denial of the genocide itself, as well as the age of the survivors—both the fact that they were young when the genocide happened, as well as their advanced age at the time of the interviews—would make the project difficult, and perhaps slightly barren. These worries proved to be unfounded.

The most fascinating of the stories collected here is, by far, Aram Güreghian's, which Dabag and Platt feature first in their book in a rather extensive fashion (it is about sixty pages long). His story, like those of others in this book, has such potential, in terms of storytelling, content, and subject matter, that it could easily serve as the basis for a more artistic retelling, such as in a novel or a movie. It is this fact that helps one understand a bit better why, perhaps, historians had shunned the stories of Armenian genocide survivors for so long: by the sheer logic of haphazard survival, often involving spectacular twists and turns and improbable portions of luck, these stories contain something of the truly incredible. They also illustrate how imperfect the Turkish genocidal net was, especially when compared to the "perfect" genocidal machine of the Nazis.

Güreghian's story tells of a continuous chain of lucky turns in utterly devastating overall circumstances. His story begins with his earliest memories, of a childhood overcast with a cloud of seemingly constant death, both of family members and neighbors. His individual journey of survival begins when his mother "trades" him for some water to "a Kurd," or, rather, gives him a chance of survival that she cannot herself provide any longer. From there Güreghian's personal odyssey begins. It eventually led him to Urfa where he lived on the streets among other survivors of the first wave of the genocide. When Urfa was attacked and "cleansed" of the surviving Armenians, he was again able to slip through the genocidal net. He drifted further among the survivors until he was able to find his brother. Much later, after the end of World War I and during the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923), and after more wandering and suffering, he and his brother were...