Grigoris Balakian - Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918

The literature of witness has had a significant impact on our understanding of the twentieth century. What we know about our age of catastrophe we know in crucial part from memoirs such as Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel's Night, Michihiko Hachiya's Hiroshima Diary, Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope, and many others, stories that have taken us inside episodes of mass violence and killing, genocide and torture. They have allowed us acquaintance with individual victims and perpetrators, offering insights into the nature of torture, cruelty, suffering, survival, and death. By the end of the twentieth century some scholars had referred to our time as an age of testimony.

Grigoris Balakian's memoir Armenian Golgotha, for decades an important text of Armenian literature, belongs to this group of significant books that deal with crimes against humanity in the modern age. Balakian, a priest and later a bishop in the Armenian Apostolic Church, was an esteemed clergyman and intellectual. On the night of April 24, 1915, along with about 250 other Armenian cultural leaders (writers, clergy teachers, journalists), he was arrested in Constantinople, the cultural center of Ottoman Armenians, and deported by bus and then train to a prison in Chankiri, about two hundred miles east, in north central Turkey. Bewildered and terrified, he could not have imagined that he was at the beginning of an odyssey that would last nearly four years, the duration of World War I. He was one of only a handful of the original group to survive the ordeal; against all odds, he would manage to escape Turkish officials, police soldiers, and killing squads.

From Chankiri, he was driven south on a forced march amid continual horrors and extremity. At various intervals he lived amid bedraggled groups of survivors; he listened to escapees, often children, tell stories of massacres and atrocities; he spent time with Islamized Armenians who poured out their anguish and inner conflicts over their predicaments. He also listened carefully to Turkish perpetrators and collaborators who, knowing that he was marked for death, opened up to him with candor that was tinged at times with gloating and at other times with guilt. His long interview with Captain Shukri, on the road from Yozgat to Boghazliyan, is particularly poignant. He spoke as well with righteous Turks, like the mutasarrif Asaf of Chankiri, who, revolted by the plan to exterminate the Armenians, warned Balakian of what was about to happen.

Along his many roads of exile, Balakian witnessed slaughter, fields of corpses, and starving women and children. He gathered invaluable firsthand testimony from numerous survivors as well as eyewitness accounts from German, Swiss, and Austrian engineers and administrators who were constructing the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway through the Amanos and Taurus mountains. Through an unusual encounter with mutasarrif Asaf in the summer of 1915, he read an official telegram from Talaat inquiring about the efficiency of massacres in the regiona moment he would recall when he testified at the trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, who assassinated Talaat Pasha in Berlin in 1921.

For about two months Balakian was one of a group of threadbare survivors forced to walk hundreds of miles south along a central deportation route. Traveling from Chankiri through Choroum, Yozgat, Kayseri, Hajin, and Sis, all the way to Islahiye (not far from today's northern Syrian border), he became the unofficial leader of these deportees, who were being taken by Turkish police soldiers to die in the desert region of Der Zor, in northe astern Syriaa place that was to become the epicenter of death in the Armenian Genocide. Through wild, harsh, and remote terrain, he helped keep them alive, caring for their physical and spiritual needs. For the next year and a half he was a fugitive.

In order to understand the circumstances of Balakian's survival, it is important to understand the political and cultural role the Armenian Apostolic Church (the mother church, as Balakian commonly refers to it) played in Armenian life in the Ottoman Empire. The Church was the basis of much of Armenian political power in Turkey, and the Church and particularly the patriarchate in Istanbul conducted its own diplomatic relations with officials in foreign countries. Balakian, who was an emissary for the patriarchate, had considerable experience as a church diplomat with both Ottoman and foreign officials. As a vartabed (a celibate priest), he occupied a position of leadership and prestige in Armenian life, and so it is not surprising that fellow Armenians went to great lengths to protect him and aid in his escapes, often risking their own lives.

Because he had been educated in Germany, first as an engineering student at Mittweida University in Saxony and later as a graduate student in theology at the University of Berlin, his fluency in German enabled him to engage the German engineers and administrators along the railway; it would later prove vital to his disguise and ultimate escape. With wit and ingenuity, Balakian took on various identities: a German worker on the railway, a German Jew, a German engineer, a railway administrator, a German soldier, and a Greek vineyard worker.

As he managed to stay alive through an extraordinary chain of circumstances, Balakian became an observer of what one might call the inner life of the Armenian Genocide. Thus the perspective of witness here is more multifarious and broad than in most survivor memoirs. We see, in process, the government planned, systematic, race extermination, as The New York Times referred to it in 1915, from conception to execution; from its impact on the victimswomen, children, and men of all agesto its impact on the perpetrators and bystanders.

It will be clear to any reader that Armenian Golgotha is more than a personal story, for Balakian brings together a survivor account, eyewitness testimony, historical background and context, and political analysis. Throughout the narrative he discloses essential elements of the politics, sociology, and ideology of the Turkish extermination plan. His analyses of Turkish culture and of the structure of the CUP (Ittihad government) plan to exterminate the Armenian population are astute and soberly accurate for the most part, upheld by decades of scholarship since. In a crucial chapter, Plan for the Extinction of the Armenians in Turkey, Balakian gives us an eleven-point outline of the Young Turks final solution. While decades of good scholarship have explored the causes, contexts, and morphology of the Armenian Genocide, his outline remains a general blueprint for an understanding of this event.