The characters in this story are fictional, but everything that happens to Rosmerta and her family in this story happened to many people in real life. I relocated some historical events to Bayburt, since that is where my characters started their journey. There was not one, but three deportations from Bayburt. As far as I know, no one followed Rosmerta’s exact path to Massachusetts. However, to this day, there is a thriving Armenian community in Worcester.
What happened to the Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire is generally referred to as the first genocide of the Twentieth Century. Regrettably, it was not the first genocide. Worse, it was not the last. On multiple occasions, Hitler referenced the atrocities committed against the Armenians as an example of what should be done to his enemies and pointed out that there were few negative consequences for those who were responsible.
The point? Failure to remember the Armenian Genocide for what it was made it difficult for the world to recognize what was happening in Germany during World War II.
To this day, the government of Turkey refuses to acknowledge the crimes committed against the Armenians between 1913 and 1923. In January 2017, Turkish parliament member Garo Paylan stated that the Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Jews were “exiled from these lands or subjected to tortures as a result of large massacres and genocide.” For his comments, Paylan was suspended from parliament. In July that same year, the term “Armenian Genocide” was banned within the Turkish legislature.
Shamefully, because Turkey is recognized as a valuable ally, the United States has not officially recognized the fact of the Armenian Genocide, although most states have.
As the Holocaust has taught us, failure to remember dooms us to repeat:
Genocide since World War I
I want to stress that this novel is not meant to be an indictment of Muslims. In the story, Dr. Tarik and Muhammad Kasaba were Muslims. In fact, every account I have read or heard about Armenians surviving the deportations involves their getting help from someone. In many cases, that help came from Muslims. While it is true that it was Muslims who perpetrated the atrocities against the Armenians, it was Christians who committed the Holocaust, as well as the horrors in Bosnia and Rwanda.
The sad truth is that it is part of the human condition: we are very good at categorizing each other into groups, labeling those groups, and assigning blame to them. Once we have identified a group of people as being responsible for all the ills that befall us, it is all too easy to hate them. And it is an easy path from hating a group of people to killing them. The path sometimes leads to disgusting extremes. In the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), pygmies were hunted for food.
Especially now, when lethal means are so readily available to everyone, it is critical that we are aware of these tendencies, and that we are on the lookout for those who might act upon them. For, if we do not guard against it, it will happen again.