A couple of years ago I gave a lecture at a French university on the
intergenerational transmission of historical trauma. After it, a group
of students from what seemed a variety of countries—gathered to ask
me questions. Was it important to me, they wanted to know, that the
government of Germany acknowledged the Nazi genocide of Jews?
Yes, I said. It was very important. I wondered which of the twentieth
century genocides –Armenian? Rwandan? Cambodian?—the families of
the students before me had survived and, not for the first time, was
astonished at the depth with which historic trauma marks its survivors
generations later.
It may be politically expedient to deny the Armenian genocide but
it’s morally wrong. As a writer, I support novelist Orhan Pamuk and
other courageous Turkish artists and writers who have paid dearly for
telling the truth. As the daughter of Czech Jews whose families were
all but wiped out during the Holocaust, I understand not only the
concrete facts of destruction of life, culture and community but the
long-term psychological ramifications of genocide and the healing
power of outside validation.
When natural disasters like earthquakes or floods occur, psychiatrist
Judith Lewis Herman has written, our sympathy flows naturally and
unreservedly to their victims. But when human perpetrators wreak
disaster on victims, we are placed in a quandary. ” It is very
tempting to take the side of the perpetrator,” writes Dr, Herman,
since he or she asks nothing of us outsiders but “appeals to the
universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the
contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain, The victim
demands action, engagement and remembering.”
In the case of Holocaust survivors there were many who acted, engaged
and remembered: the courageous men and women who hid and helped Jews
during the Nazi occupation; the members of the Resistance in almost
all the European countries; the members of the Allied armies –
Soviet,
British and American – who liberated the concentration camps and
wrote
home about what they saw; the eyewitness reporters like Edward R.
Murrow and photographers and film-makers whose documents of genocide
can be found in libraries and archives throughout the world. In the
earlier Armenian genocide, there were no film-makers but now
semi-forgotten public servants such as then American Ambassador Henry
Morgenthau, and Cleveland Dodge.
There’s no controversy about the reality of the Armenian genocide
anywhere outside Turkey. In our Czech-Jewish household, the Armenian
genocide was recognized as the first of the twentieth century by my
parents, both of whom survived the Nazi concentration camps. They were
among the hundreds of thousands of readers of the Prague-born Jewish
writer Franz Werfel whose novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh became an
international best-seller in 1933. For many European Jews who faced
deportation and death in the ensuing years, the Armenian community of
Musa Dagh became a symbol of defiance and survival.
Werfel’s book has been criticized as fiction—like the TV
miniseries Holocaust or Roots—but it is based on what most educated
people at the time knew as recent history. The International
Association of Genocide Scholars has declared the historical record on
the Armenian Genocide unambiguous, as per the official documentation
available in archives of the United States, France, Great Britain,
Russia, the official records of Turkey’s World War I allies, Germany
and Austria-Hungary, and the records of the Ottoman Courts of
1918-1920.
The Bush Administration’s capitulation to Turkish blackmail on this
issue (In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Defense Secretary
Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote that after
France’s national assembly voted last year to condemn the Armenian
genocides Turkey canceled contracts with the French military. “A
similar reaction by the elected government of Turkey to a House
resolution could harm American troops in the field, constrain our
ability to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and significantly
damage our efforts to promote reconciliation between Armenia and
Turkey at a key turning point in their relations.”
To one of the very few Czech Jews whose family survived the second
world war, their response recalls the now much-quoted and pathetically
short-sighted words of Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of
Great Britain in 1938 who declared “How horrible and fantastic it is
that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here
because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we
know nothing.” President Bush and his advisors should take the moral
and long-range view, and reconsider their policies.