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Survivors of the Armenian Genocide

By James Estrin
Nazik Armenakyan has spent the last decade in a desperate race against death: She has been scouring Armenia searching for survivors of the Armenian genocide. She is determined to photograph them and provide an enduring document of their experiences a century ago.

Although she found 45 survivors, she has sometimes arrived in remote villages only to find that death got there first. After one trek, she reached a survivor’s home only to find a hearse parked in front. She broke into tears.
“I turned to leave, but then stopped because I realized that even in death I needed to take her photo,” Ms. Armenakyan said, “to show that even if they live to be 100 years these witnesses are not permanent.”
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Yelena Abrahamyan, born 1912, city of Kars. 2008. “I’ve seen this with my own eyes — a woman with a child in her lap, jumped into the river. The river was swollen, it was deep in that gorge — not very wide since they were able to make that wooden bridge — but it was deep. It carried away all sort of things — corpses, clothes, a cradle… And I stood there at the head of the bridge, witnessing all of that. It’s interesting that people were stone cold: nobody was crying, there was no sound… The first scream was the voice of that ten-year old boy’s mother. After that, I don’t know, perhaps I’d gone deaf, I couldn’t hear anything… There was no sound, no crying, no screaming. Whoever came out would run downwards to make their escape.”Credit Nazik Armenakyan
As Armenians prepare to observe the genocide memorial this Sunday, only two of her subjects are still alive. Armenians commemorate April 24, 1915, as the start of the genocide by the Ottoman Empire, and it is generally said to have continued through 1917.
The Armenian population went from some two million to fewer than 400,000 by 1922, as some 1.5 million were killed in what most historians consider a genocide. There were executions into mass graves, and death marches of men, women and children to concentration camps with many dying along the way. The Turkish government disputes many of these accounts and rejects the term genocide.
The New York Times covered the issue extensively — describing the actions against the Armenians as “systematic,” “authorized, and “organized by the government.” Some survivors found their way to Eastern Armenia, which came under Soviet control in 1922. After the Soviet Union broke apart, the independent Republic of Armenia was formed in 1991.
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Varsenik Lagisyan, born 1908, Yoğunoluk village, Musa Dagh, Aleppo Vilayet. 2008. “We will either kill, or be killed — that was what we thought about what we should do when the Turks entered our village. They announced that we had to leave our homes. The elders — women, men — called a meeting and decided to go up Musa Dagh… I remember well, that the French ship came and took us to Egypt… We’d been saved, so we rejoiced.”Credit Nazik Armenakyan
Ms. Armenakyan, 39, grew up in Armenia while it was still under Soviet control and learned only the basic facts of the genocide in school. The government, she said, discouraged any sense of Armenian identity.
Most of the survivors she photographed — in their 90s or over 100 — were children when they escaped the violence. Afterward, they survived the extreme hardships under Stalin and during World War II. For almost 70 years, few of them spoke about the genocide.
“They couldn’t talk about it under the Soviets,” Ms. Armenakyan said. “During Stalin’s time they would have been sent to Siberia.”
She started the project in 2005 while participating in a World Press Photo workshop at the Caucasus Institute in Yerevan, Armenia. Given a simple portrait assignment, she chose a survivor who was then 100 years old. The woman could not hear or see and “was halfway between life and death,” Ms. Armenakyan recalled.
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Mari Vardanyan, born 1907, city of Malatya. “We had a very big house. We had paying tenants living in our house. At one time, there were even two Turkish boys living there, they were students in some prestigious institution. They wanted to live in an Armenian’s house, so that there wouldn’€™t be any love affairs. They wouldn’€™t be able to get high positions in government if they ended up falling in love with an Armenian. Then the massacres began. My grandmother sold our house and gave the money she received to the government, so that they wouldn’€™t arrest my father. We were hidden away by some Turks in their house. There were good Turks too. There was a command that if a Turk kept an Armenian in their home, they’€™d be hanged to death right at their threshold… There is a saying: if our children forget so much evil then may the whole world reprimand the Armenians.”Credit Nazik Armenakyan
This experience spurred her to photograph as many survivors as possible. She spent days with each of her subjects, getting to know them, helping them with chores and gaining their trust.
Ms. Armenakyan was one of the first women to be employed as a news photographer by Armenian publications and was a Magnum Human Rights Foundation Fellow in 2011. She was a co-founder of4plus, a collective of Armenian female photographers, along with Anush Babajanyan and Anahit Hayrapetyan.
4plus has published a book, “Survivors,” with Ms. Armenakyan’s stark images, which are at times reminiscent of Christian Orthodox icons in their directness. She says that she has an obligation to the few living eyewitnesses to the genocide.
“These people told me very, very personal and difficult memories from their childhood,” she said. “I feel a responsibility to build this bridge from past to present and a responsibility to share this.”

Follow @nazikarmenakyan, @jamesestrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Nazik Armenakyan is also on Instagram. Lens is also onFacebook and Instagram.

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