WEST OF MALATIA

1895

What did your eyes see my father that silenced you forever? When I was a young boy I could see the anger that was there but I never knew why.  I grew up thinking that it was me you hated.  I thought that’s just the way he is. My brother, David felt the same way, saying, I never understood the old man. I grew up living with your anger, seeing through my child’s eyes a man who appeared to be a paradox in character and personality.  You were deep within yourself; driven by the cold fury that I think was placed there by the Sultan. I grew up as an only child accustomed to your passive exterior, observing your rare expressions of emotion in your love for my mother, When my brother was born thirteen years later, Mother was thirty-eight- years -old and you were forty-eight.  He was a child of the forties and fifties, born into a culture that was very different from the one you knew. I was a first generation Armenian born in America but raised in a house that still followed the customs and traditions of the old country.  It was 1926 and I am sure the memory of Armenia was still fresh in your mind.  You came to America with the influence of culture and tradition from an ancient civilization.

Ancient history, Greeks, Romans, Persians and Turks have played a role in the life you lived in Malatia, your hometown in old Armenia in the 1890’s. In a sense you were a child of the 18th century living in a new country that was the antithesis to your religion and society. After you arrived in America in 1909 you were still influenced by customs and family from the old country.  As a first generation born in America I was taught to obey my parents.

However, by 1940 our world would distance you from my brother and it would never be reconciled, the gap widening even more as he grew older.  He never knew what burned in you and what had happened to you.

You lived with that anger for a lifetime. I suspect it never left and peace never came to you. But someone should have anticipated the impending catastrophe. The elders or leaders should have known or suspected that something was going to happen. It had happened before. Who knows how many times over six centuries the crime of murder was perpetuated until only a few million Armenians remained? The Turks had massacred the Armenians before. There is an axiom that history repeats itself.  It did in 1895, tragically for you and your family as well as your relatives and friends. It did for all the Armenians in Anatolia. It was the precursor of the Genocide still to come. In your small village your mother sent you to school, and you went to church and played with your friends.  There was nothing to fear. After all the Armenians were civilized and the hatred for them was too horrible to comprehend, The Christians stayed in their quarter and the Moslems in theirs, living side by side as they had for centuries.

You were a child when it happened to you and the family.  The Sultan’s Hamidye struck.  Itinerant Kurds, Turkish criminals and army irregulars formed a homogenous mixture and attacked the Armenians in Vilayets, villages and towns like Malatia, Akhisar, Sassum, Trebizond.  Your child eyes saw people butchered with axes, scimitars, knives and guns. People were dying around you, falling in pain and agony.  Armenian girls were attacked and then carried away into slavery never to be seen by their family.  You were only three but you would never forget.

That is where the seed of hate was sown to grow into the cold fury in the man.  You lived through the years of massacres and persecution during the 1890’s until you escaped and fled to America in 1909 taking your anger to America where it would remain roiling in you until the day you died.  250,000 Armenians died in 1895 and countless others in the ensuing years. You saw killings in a style that hailed back many centuries. Where the mounds of skulls called Golgotha were familiar sights along the dusty roadsides of Anatolia and Christians knelt before a scimitar-wielding Turk waiting to be decapitated.  Historians estimated that the massacre’s beginning in 1895 took approximately five hundred thousand Armenian lives. It was one of the Sultan’s last acts before the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the Young Turks deposed the Sultan.

I saw your tears for the first time when my Brother left for a Navy Base in Arizona and I wondered why as we left the airport. You had suffered your first stroke and Joanne, my wife, said it was because you knew that you would not see him again.

“I don’t know what to say, Paddy” I said.

He replied, “You don’t have to say a