Blog : Ragazou

By JANICE ARNOLD, Staff Reporter (CJN)

 

MONTREAL ? A photo exhibition currently on display in the foyer of Federation CJA recognizes the deaths of up to 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I as a genocide perpetrated by the Turks.

Liana Fisher, a Holocaust survivor, views the exhibit ?The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust: One Man Takes a Stand,? now on display in the Federation CJA lobby.

 

The exhibit, which continues until May 16, is jointly presented by the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre (MHMC) and the local Armenian community to mark the 95th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian massacre and the 65th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust.

 

Although they may seem like natural partners, this is the first formal collaboration between the MHMC and Armenian Montrealers. What brought them together is a man regarded as a hero by both communities.

 

Armin T. Wegner, who took the gruesome pictures of dead, starving and homeless men, women and children that haunt the federation hall, was not Armenian or Jewish. He was a German who served as a nurse in the German army during World War I.

 

Although he risked death for exposing his country's Turkish allies, he took numerous photos and kept diaries of the persecution, deportation and murder of the Armenians, a Christian minority. According to the exhibition, there were just under two million Armenians scattered from Constantinople to the Persian border before 1915.

 

Wegner, a writer and journalist, hoped the photos would alert the world to what was happening. He even pleaded for intervention in a letter to then-U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, to no avail.

 

In the 1930s, when the Nazi persecution of Jews began, Wegner was one of the few voices speaking out against it. He even dared write an open letter to Hitler. He was imprisoned, and according to his son, Michele Wegner, who came in from Rome for the opening of the exhibition, he was tortured and bore the psychological scars until the end of his life in exile in 1978.

 

Wegner was recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1968, and, in 1996, after an independent Armenia was established, his ashes were re-interred in the new state.

 

The exhibition has been organized by the Armin T. Wegner Society in the United States, which was founded seven years ago to make his courageous efforts better known.

 

The exhibit's title is ?The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust: One Man Takes a Stand.?

 

MHMC president Susyn Borer, in her remarks, emphasized that both genocides ?did take place,? and she spoke of Jews' and Armenians' ?shared sense of memory' and the responsibility to bear witness. Wegner, she continued, deserves to be remembered, not only by these communities, but by all Quebecers.

 

?The purpose is not only to learn about history, but first of all to confront history,? she said. (Turkey continues to deny an Armenian genocide.)

 

Varante Yapoudjian, a vice-president of the exhibition's co-sponsor, the United Committee for the Commemoration of the 95th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, was more blunt.

 

?No sum of money that the Turkish government spends in its ongoing campaign of denial can counter the proof provided in the photos on view,? he said.

 

?Young Armenians of my generation are not only here to remember, but to say to the deniers, ?We are here to defend the truth.??

 

Wegner said that in the 1960s, when the Armenian community began asking him about his father's long-forgotten photos, he was threatened by Turks. ?

 

They said, ?Destroy those pictures, otherwise we will come to your home and do it,?? said the younger Wegner, who was born in 1941.

 

Canada recognized the Armenian massacre as a genocide perpetrated by the Turks in 2004. Quebec had done the same the year before. The province has an active Armenian community of about 25,000.

 

The United States. has not extended official recognition, nor has Israel, to which Turkey has been a rare ally in the region. A motion by a Meretz Party member has been tabled unsuccessfully in the Knesset for the past three years and is expected to come up again this month.

 

Some in the Jewish community have also been reluctant to draw comparisons between the Armenian and Jewish tragedies, feeling it might detract from the singularity of the Holocaust. This exhibit brings to mind Holocaust scenes, with its corpses, emaciated, terrorized victims, deportations and camps.

 

Holocaust survivor Joseph Fishman, however, welcomed the community's effort to bring attention to the Armenian genocide.

 

?It's a marvellous thing. Thank God, 95 years later, we finally know about this and are talking about it.? He thinks the Turks should follow the example of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who recognized the massacre of thousands of Poles at Katyn.

 

A native of Hungary who was deported to Auschwitz, Fishman recalls as a youngster his parents talking about a report in the papers just before World War II that Hitler told his army commanders that Germany could get away with exterminating the Jews because, ?Who remembers the Armenians'?

 

MHMC communications director Audrey Licop said the exhibition should not be interpreted as a comparison with the Holocaust, any more than the collaboration the MHMC already has with the Rwandan community in commemorating the 1994 genocide.

 

?We have to say ?never again' to any genocide. It's not to blame the Turks, but to show how one man took a stand,? she said.

 

Egyptian-born Aida Karibian, looking at the photos, said, ?I have never been to these places, but is almost as if I lived it because I grew up with it. What happened was described to me day after day.?

 

The world can't forget and Turkey should admit its mistake, she said, but Armenians won't let politics prevent them from preserving their history.

 

?I'm very, very happy that the Jewish community is hosting this commemoration side by side with us.?  

 

Harry Dikranian, a 42-year-old lawyer who has educated himself on the Holocaust, said ?genocide should not be politicized.?

 

He, too, was thrilled by this Armenian-Jewish co-operation. ?There has been co-operation at the academic and social level. This has brought it to the institutional level, which is very important.?

 

The exhibition has multiple meanings for Israeli-Canadian artist Esti Mayer, some of whose works have Holocaust themes. Her maternal great-grandfather, who lived in western Turkey, was executed by the Turks for his attempt to give succor to the Armenians in his village.

 

David Gormezano witnessed the rounding up of his Armenian neighbours and their mass murder in a ravine, the bodies burned. The Turks came for him a few days later, and threw him alive into a pit of lye, his wife and two children surviving him, although one would later die of starvation.

 

Mayer, whose father was Israeli consul general in Montreal in the 1980s, said she is ?embarrassed' by the Israeli government's refusal to recognize the genocide.

 

?Whatever the relationship Israel has with Turkey, whatever the realpolitik, the truth deserves to be spoken. The Armenian tragedy legitimated what subsequently happened to the Jewish people. Eventually, I think the right thing will be done