I Cannot Walk

Arousiag Dadian Boyajian was born in 1905 and came to Ellis Island in 1921. This 1993 Interview is taken from the Ellis Island Oral History Program Archives

"I told my mother, 'I cannot walk.' Anyway, before we got there I told many times to my mother, 'Please, leave me here. I want to stay here. I can't walk anymore.' And she used to drag me. One day all the group went and just me and my mother were left, 'I'm not coming, you go.' So the gendarme came back from the group and he came and hit my mother with the rifle, you know with the sword. And I was hollering, she was hollering ...He said, `Come on, walk.' So we walked."

This must be the only example of Armenian Oral History that showed a gendarme as a hero. Who knows what could have happened to the mother and child if they were left behind in no man’s land.

Siamanto's "The Dance"

 

The Dance

by Siamanto (1878-1915)

Translated from the Armenian by Shant Norashkharian.

First published in Boston, 1910, by Hairenik Publishers and reprinted in 1979 by Caravan Books. This is public domain.

And as her tears drowned in her blue eyes,
On a field of ash where Armenian life was still dying,
This is what the witness of our horror, the German woman narrated:

"This story which I tell you and which cannot be told,
I saw with my cruel human eyes,
From the window of my safe house which looked on hell,
Crushing my teeth from my terrible rage...

With my cruelly human eyes I saw .
It was in Garden city, which was turned to a pile of ashes.
The corpses were piled high to the top of the trees,
And from the waters, from the fountains, from the streams, from the
roads,
The rebellious murmur of your blood...
Still speaks now its vengeance into my ears...

O, don't be shocked when I tell you this story which cannot be told...
Let men understand the crime of man against man,
Under the sun of two days, on the road to the cemetery
The evil of man against man,
Let all the hearts of the world know...
That morning in death's shadow was a Sunday,
The first and helpless Sunday which rose over the corpses,
When inside my room, from evening to dawn,
Bending over the agony of a girl slashed with a sword,
I was wetting her death with my tears...
Suddenly from afar a black, beastly mob
Brutally whipping the twenty brides who were with them,
Stood in a vineyard singing songs of debauchery.

Leaving the poor dying girl on her mattress,
I approached the balcony of my window which looked on hell...
In the vineyard the black mob became a forest.
A savage roared to the brides: "You must dance,
You must dance when our drum sounds."
And the whips started wildly cracking on the bodies
Of the Armenian women who were missing death...
Twenty brides, hand in hand, started their round dance...
The tears flowed from their eyes like wounds,
Ah, how much I envied my wounded neighbor,
Because I heard, that with a peaceful moan,
Cursing the universe, the poor beautiful Armenian girl,
To her young dove spirit gave wings toward the stars...
In vain I moved my fists against the mob.
"You must dance", roared the furious crowd,
"You must dance until your death, lustfully and lasciviously,
Our eyes are thirsty for your movements and your death..."

The twenty beautiful brides fell to the ground exhausted...
"Stand up", they shrieked, waving their naked swords like snakes...
Then someone brought to the mob a barrel of oil...
O, human justice, let me spit at your forehead...!
They anointed the twenty brides hastily with that liquid...

"You must dance", they roared, "here is a perfume for you which even
Arabia does not have..."
Then they ignited the naked bodies of the brides with a torch,
And the charcoaled corpses rolled from dance to death...

In my terror I closed the shutters of my window like a storm,
And approaching my lonely dead girl I asked:
"How can I dig my eyes out, how can I dig them out, tell me...?"

 

Siamanto (1878-1915), (born Atom Yarjanian [Western Armenian
transliteration] in 1878: his 1910 work is copyrighted to "A.Y.
Siamanto").One of the most important Armenian poets of the twentieth century. Siamanto was one of hundreds of intellectuals and political and spiritual leaders who were rounded up on April 24, 1915 and killed. In his case, he was held in detention until August, when he was murdered.

Holdwater: Murdered... or executed for treason? Somebody had to lead the Armenians during their treacherous revolt, in the darkest hour of their dying nation. Could these leaders have come from the ranks of the bellhops from the local hotel, or from among the "hundreds of intellectuals and political and spiritual leaders"? Siamanto sure doesn't sound like an impartial Ottoman citizen.

The ringleaders who were rounded up on April 24 amounted to "hundreds" all right... slightly over two hundred (235), which just makes it into the "hundreds" category. According to the Armenian Review (Aut. 1960) article on Soghoman Tehlirian, the Ottoman police worked with informers, as does the police force of any nation. These leaders were not arrested haphazardly. The Armenian informer most responsible for pointing out the "April 24" Armenians working against the state was killed by the assassin who later took the life of Talat Pasha.

The above might have been part of an article from a Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, June 16, 2001 (regarding the then-upcoming film, ARARAT), where what follows is definitely excerpted from. This article begins:

There's a poem, says Oscar nominated director Atom Egoyan, that every Armenian kid knows.

It's called The Bride, and was written by the poet Siamanto (his real name was Atom Yarjanian) who was born in 1878 and died in 1915, one of the first of the 1.5- million people murdered by the Young Turks during the Armenian genocide.

The poem is raw. It holds a mirror up to ugly men, who did an
unspeakably ugly thing: tortured 20 young brides, who were made to dance naked, hand in hand, before a crazed mob. They twisted and twirled. And when they fell to the ground, exhausted, their captors shrieked for them to stand. They doused them in kerosene and torched the bodies. "And the charcoal corpses
rolled from dance to death," Siamanto wrote.

Well, that "charcoal corpses" line is the one from the poem above, entitled "The Dance." Yet, the poem "every Armenian kid knows" (confirming that just about all Armenian kids are taught this delightful genocide topic, along with Turk-hating, since birth) is called... "The Bride"? Hey, get your facts straight, Armenians. (Good grief. What am I saying?)

At any rate, the article states, "Egoyan filmed his re-enactment of Siamanto's incensed account of that insane event." In other words, here we've got a poem, and it's treated as historical fact. A story "witnessed" by an unnamed German woman. A German woman who happened to be in the Ottoman Empire, whom we can safely conclude could only have been a missionary, assuming she existed at all. She was watching this event, this event that Atom Egoyan decided to showcase in his movie as fact, from the window of her "safe house." As the tears were drowning her blue eyes, not only was she able to ascertain that the twenty brides were "beautiful" (I suppose the story would not have the same impact, if these women were anything short of "beautiful"), but the German woman testified that the "corpses were piled to the top of the"... trees?

That must have been one heck of a balancing act.

I suppose the poet was entitled to take... ehhh... "poetic license"; unfortunately, everyone from Atom Egoyan to the writer of this newspaper article, and especially "every Armenian kid," looks at this tale and automatically concludes it must have actually taken place. Just like every other missionary-concocted horror story that newspapers of the period printed as pure fact. (And this blind belief in whatever the Armenians claim still goes on in the Western press. It's really amazing.)

Is this story supposed to be representative of what took place during the Armenian "Genocide"? But... it was published five years before the main year of the "genocide," in 1910. Were these twenty Armenian brides stripped and burned as practice, a few years before the "genocide"? Or are we asked to believe these horrendous stories took place routinely and all the time, before the "genocide" even got a running start?

Or... could the Armenian poet simply have made this tall tale up? What a concept.

 

THE ARMENIAN EXHIBIT ON ELLIS ISLAND

 

When I visited Ellis Island years ago, I was taken aback by the one-sided representation, regarding the Armenian “Genocide.” I thought, what does genocide have to do with a New York City museum regarding the one-time, historic first stop for immigrants to America? (Ellis Island is just a hop and a skip away from the Statue of Liberty.)

The first two examples of “Oral History” you have read on this page are courtesy of an Armenian web site celebrating Ellis Island’s Armenian exhibit. For me, however, the story of how the exhibit came to be was most revealing.

Ellis Island, the site tells us, receives 70,000 visitors weekly. What an advertisement for the Armenian “Genocide.”

The name of the museum’s director and curator? Margaret C. TellalianKyrkostas. A double dosage of Armenian-Greek. Are you beginning to get the picture?

Among the supporters of "Armenia: Memories From My Home" in 1997 were probable husband and Museum Vice President, Theodore Kyrkosta, and “Armenian Collector,” Michael Kehyaian. The “Ellis Island Armenian Exhibit Committee” was comprised of Edward D.Jamie, Michael Kehyaian, George Kevorkian, Margaret Kyrkostas, Ted Kyrkostas, Aris Sevag, and Mary Toumayan.

The Armenian site reports:

“On August 29,1997, one week before the exhibit was to open, Deputy Superintendent Larry Steeler and Chief Exhibit Curator Diana Pardue informed TellalianKyrkostas that the massacre photographs… and especially the display panel headings, "Genocide" and "Massacres"…would not be allowed to be displayed. The reasons they gave were: "They would be offensive to young children"; " We already have a massacre photograph on the second floor and we don't want any more"; and "We have had visitors objecting to nonimmigration topics."

Well, that last reason in particular makes a lot of sense to me. The museum has some wonderful sections regarding how the arriving immigrants would be screened and other relevant issues that directly had to do with the museum’s purpose. The problems the immigrants faced in the old country has nothing to do with a museum that celebrates a historic immigration admittance center to The New Land.

“New York City Council Speaker Peter Vallone, a guest speaker at the opening ceremonies, vehemently objected to the censorship and started a campaign to reinstate the censored material.”

“Other government officials”… that is, Armenian butt-kissers ”protested.” On September 11, The New York Times … that is, America’s historic Armenian butt-kissing newspaper… “broke the story,” and other news outlets covered “the controversy.”

“A Fresno, California press conference by Armenian National Committee of America Chairman Mourad Topalian was covered by local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox television.” Uhhh… that wouldn’t be convicted terrorist Mourad Topalian, would it? The one-time ANCA rep caught red handed with a storage depot full of explosives and ammunition… and whose manufactured bomb allegedly exploded in front of New York City’s Turkish office, wounding three passersby?

A couple of weeks later, the Ellis Island folks buckled under to the pressure and “agreed to reinstate some of the photographs and text documenting the Armenian Genocide.” The pressure group that orchestrated the big hullabaloo included Margaret TellalianKyrkostas, Sharistan Melconian, Shahan Avedian, Rev. Anoushavan Tanielian, Aram Arkun, Rev. Nishan Bakalian, Vartkes Vartanian, Nicole Vartanian, and a lawyer for City Council Speaker Peter Vallone. “The controversy surrounding the exhibit raised the disquieting possibility that the United States Government had engaged in censoring the exhibit's message.”

“The facts, figures, photographs and graphics for the exhibit were researched by Margaret TellalianKyrkostas and Aris Sevag. Aram Arkun verified some of the data on the massacres.” Oh, good. Thankfully, such impartial foxes were put in charge of this chicken coop, and undoubtedly the principles of truth and fairness could not have even come close to being compromised.