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Sunday, January 13, 2008
Ds Create Your Own Pokemon Game
My Armenian side
I
fourth Armenia. My mother's grandparents came from Armenia during the decade of 10, escaping the known as the first genocide of the modern era. I
the Caucasus, and Armenia in particular, has a strategic position as a crossroads of trade caravans between East and West, which has been of great interest to the people who surrounded the area, making it successively conquered by Persians , Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines and Arabs.
Turkish-Ottoman Empire and the Russian and divided up the territory. What is now Armenia joined the Russian Empire, and a larger portion joined what is now Turkey. Part of the government policy of the Young Turks considered the elimination of the Armenian people. More than one and half million Armenians were killed, starved and deported.
My great-grandparents and siblings escaped looking to survive and could never return home. Mardin, the village where they were born, is in Turkey and I could not meet on this trip. It was a business trip and the borders between the two countries are closed, which made it difficult for entry into Turkey from Armenia, complicating the travel itinerary. So my desire to see the streets that they walked for a new round was to that area.
Genocide was something I had always heard about, but I was not clear to go to the genocide memorial and museum. There, in the hills of Yerevan, a monument where a flame burns in memory of those who died. Watching that called me was very close to this grandmother shared with only a couple of months. It was a feeling that came over me deeply.
After entering the museum the feeling became even stronger. Photos of the day caused me great distress. When I think of friends and relatives Felix and Emilia who went through the same fate. And seeing the pictures somehow grateful that their parents they had been forced to flee across the world, because without that I would not exist and they would have been another one of those bodies that portrayed the photos: shot, beheaded, starved , wronged.
And it was very sad that a mixture of thank and ache. Very sad.
had forgotten those feelings, that I felt choking at the photos and documents and articles of the time. This week I was reviewing the images for the documentary, and came back to me some of that pain.
What makes a man turn against itself? What makes that human beings attack their own species? What does that hatred is stronger than everything? Why not learn? Why do we fall back into this stupid folly of attacking each other?
My great grandparents are reflected in my eyes and the color of my skin, under the noses of most of my family, in the shape of all men, in some taste of my grandmother and her sisters, in words that were in the vocabulary family, food. They survived and a family born of that journey they undertook.
close my eyes and pray peace for those who could not. And I ask because it ceases to be repeated, because one day be able, the human race to stop attacking us and harm us.
Pola
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