The month of April marks the 95th
anniversary of the start of the Armenian genocide. An unusual television
documentary shows what motivated the murderers and why Germany, and
other countries, remained silent.
Tigranui Asartyan will be 100 this week. She put away her knives and
forks two years ago, when she lost her sense of taste, and last year she
stopped wearing glasses, having lost her sight. She lives on the
seventh floor of a high-rise building in the Armenian capital Yerevan,
and she hasn't left her room in months. She shivers as the cold
penetrates the gray wool blanket on her lap. "I'm waiting to die," she
says.
Ninety-two years ago, she was waiting in a village in on the Turkish
side of today's border, hiding in the cellar of a house. The body of an
Armenian boy who had been beaten to death lay on the street. Women were
being raped in the house next door, and the eight-year-old girl could
hear them screaming. "There are good and bad Turks," she says. The bad
Turks beat the boy to death, while the good Turks helped her and her
family to flee behind withdrawing Russian troops.
Avadis Demirci, a farmer, is 97. If anyone in his country keeps
records on such things, he is probably the last Armenian in Turkey who
survived the genocide. Demirci looks out the window at the village of
Vakifli, where oleander bushes and tangerine trees are in full bloom.
The Mediterranean is visible down the mountain and in the distance.
In July 1915, Turkish police units marched up to the village. "My
father strapped me to his back when we fled," says Demirci. "At least
that's what my parents told me." Armed with hunting rifles and pistols,
the people from his and six other villages dug themselves in on Musa
Dagh, or Moses Mountain. Eighteen years later, Austrian writer Franz
Werfel described the villagers' armed resistance against the advancing
soldiers in his novel "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh."
Read more at
www.spiegel.de
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