“Take your family and leave here. We are going to kill all the Armenians,” said the Turk.
Those chilling words spoken in secrecy to the head of Lucie’s family by a Turkish neighbor were wisely heeded, and their exodus from their home to Aleppo, Syria, led them to a safe haven. Thus they were spared from the hideous events of the massive first genocide of the 20th century, that of the Christian-Armenian citizenry, committed by Ottoman Turks from 1915-23.
Lucie’s is just one story of exile and murder. Volumes have been spoken and written by those who survived the death marches and slaughter; they could have said much more but the unbelievable torture the Armenians witnessed and the total losses they sustained left many mute on the subject.
What about the 1,500,000 martyred victims? What would their voices tell us? Their bleached bones lay near the surface of the sands in the desert of Der Zor in Syria without the dignified burial they deserve. The Euphrates River itself tells its story of being so full of Armenian bodies that its flow was stopped. Mountain chasms too were filled with Armenian bodies. They are our family and they are calling for justice from the Turks and, at the very least, from the world community. Lucie feels anguished by it all.
Armenians are still reeling from the 1915 genocide after 100 years. Now they are dealing with jihadists’ takeover of their communities in the Middle East, like Aleppo and Kessab.
Lucie bristled when I told her what the rebels invading Aleppo and Kessab had allegedly said: “Where are all the beautiful Armenian girls?”
Lucie is a faithful reader of the Armenian Weekly and we have become friends through letters and phone conversations. She resides in New York and is an older woman with great intelligence and thoughtfulness.
Although her family was spared the horrendous fate met by most Armenians in 1915, the resulting psychological ramifications of such a terrible mental and physical act against humanity remain fresh and unresolved. It passes from one generation to the next.
If there is an event that cognizant Armenians will always remember and will rally for justice around, it is the destruction and mutilation of Armenian villages and cities in Turkey and Historic Armenia. The perpetrators believed in “Turkey for Turks,” and they swung their axes and other crude implements of death at the Armenians. And then there were the forced Islamizations…
Lucie’s family settled in Aleppo where, she says, Armenians did very well in many ways in business and various professions. Her family was educated. Her grandfather had a high accounting position in Syria for years. Lucie graduated from high school, continuing on to receive a four-year degree in Aleppo at the French university with high honors. This academic excellence caused her name to appear in newspapers and she was offered a position to teach French without having to formally apply.
She speaks Armenian, English, Turkish, and French fluently. She still enjoys reading French literary and philosophical publications.
Her heart continues to bleed for her fellow Armenians who fell in 1915, and now for those in her beloved Aleppo and Kessab. She says, “The scars never heal. Right now my heart resembles destroyed houses,” referring to the destruction in Syria.
Her unhappiness at the situation in Syria is tempered with the happy memories that remain of growing up there. At age 20, Lucie was asked to recruit and organize young Armenian girls to join the Homenetmen. “In the summer we, the boy scouts and ardzvigs (little eagles), went to Kessab for a panagoom to be in nature,” she remembers. “There we were all Armenians, all Armenian faces and our language. So my beloved Aleppo is no more; and Kessab my Heaven has sadly fallen.”
The sorrow of what has again happened to her fellow Hyes weighs heavy on Lucie’s shoulders. She wonders what the outcome will be for the displaced Armenians.
“Our schools, organizations, way of life was number one. Tashnags, Hunchags, were all active. In the agoumps there were evening speakers; there was the Armenian Relief Society, Armenian college students’ meetings and scouts,” she says. “There were Homenetmen parades, flags carried by young girls and boys all in uniforms. A crowd including Europeans bought tickets to come and watch the soccer games. That was their tashtahantes.”
It is a crime against humanity that fine people like Lucie bear the memory of the Armenian Genocide.
That memory, that we were so hated, lives on in many of us who are the first, second, and third generations in exile born in the free world, stating with determination, “We shall never forget.”
Lucie’s philosophy is: “When you fall down, just get back up. The music never ends, does it? It continues to go on and on and so must we. Life is for the living.”
Betty Apigian-Kessel
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