







































Aisthesis      Volume 10,  201957

Through the Lens of Childhood: An Alternative Examination 
of the Armenian Genocide

by Sanjna Selva

 There is a scene in the narrative film The Cut—a 
stirring melodrama written and directed by Turkish-
German filmmaker Fatih Akin—about survivor’s 
guilt and the century-old Armenian Genocide that 
cuts to the film’s bleeding heart.1 In this sequence, 
the film’s titular character, Armenian refugee Nazaret 
Manoogian, wakes up in a refugee camp in the Syrian 
desert and discovers that his two teenage daughters, 
displaced from him during the genocide, are in 
fact alive. The Cut depicts themes of dislocation, 
homelessness, and a longing to reconstruct broken 
families through the grueling search of a grieving, 
wandering father. While the film centers around 
Manoogian, it hints at the fate of the children caught 
in the crossfire of this tumultuous period. It begs a 
consideration of the lived experiences of children 
that should ultimately enable a reconsideration of 
traditional narratives of the genocide that failed 
to acknowledge them. This implores a unique 
methodological approach of centering children and 
their active positions in narratives of the genocide 
and in filling in the gaps of the Armenian diasporic 
story. 
 This paper will therefore explore the lived 
experiences of Armenian children during the 
Armenian Genocide of 1915-1922, experiences rife 
with trauma, characterized by loss, and inherently 
complex, under the shifting legal parameters that 
defined a tumultuous interwar climate. The forced 
transfer and trafficking of children from parental 
unit to institution became a common reality for 
many desperate families who were coerced into 
believing that they had no other options. In my paper, 
I will analyze the orphanages that proliferated in the 
Ottoman-ruled Middle East during the Armenian 
Genocide, specifically in present-day Lebanon and 
Turkey. Through my detailed exploration of primary 
sources, I will highlight the emotional impacts of 
abandonment, loss, and loneliness experienced 

1 The Cut, directed by Fatih Akin (2014; Germany: Pando-
ra Films, 2014), DVD.  

by survivor-children, as well as the impact of 
familial separation on their upbringing. On a 
larger scale, I will explore how certain deliberate 
nationalistic processes within the orphanages and 
the humanitarian sector at large bore generational 
effects and created a culturally-displaced Armenian 
diaspora.
 In the film, Manoogian survives a gruesome 
execution attempt that cuts his vocal chords, 
rendering him unable to speak—a motif that 
may double as a reference to the longtime silence 
maintained by Turkey concerning the genocide. It 
is a considerably risky filmmaking choice by Akin, 
but also demonstrates a brief intellectual opening in 
Turkey in accepting and acknowledging genocide 
narratives. It is remarkable that Akin succeeded in 
getting the film screened in Turkey following its 
release in 2014, something unthinkable a short time 
ago. Liberal-minded Turks in increasing numbers 
are challenging old taboos, and many Kurds living in 
Turkey have stepped forward to acknowledge their 
ancestors’ complicity in the massacres that took place.2 
The processes of acknowledging and studying the 
realities of the genocide are progressing at a hopeful 
rate. This is a far cry from past studies of the genocide 
exhibiting tendencies towards generalizations, one-
dimensional victim-perpetrator narratives, and a 
blatant denial of the genocide itself. In recent years, 
it has become increasingly common for scholars 
to publish academic studies of the history of the 
Armenian Genocide. Still, the role and significance 
of children in the genocide—specifically the transfer 
and trafficking of children into orphanages across 
Ottoman territory—has attracted little scholarly 
attention. While insights about the genocide have 
generally suffered from a dearth of historiographic 
material, sources that depicted the experiences of 
children were even scarcer, posing methodological 
2 Raffi Khatchadourian, “Remembering the Arme-
nian Genocide,” The New Yorker, April 21, 2015, https://
www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/remember-
ing-the-armenian-genocide.



Through the Lens of Childhood: An Alternative Examination of the Armenian Genocide

Aisthesis      Volume 10,  201958

challenges for scholars studying the experiences of 
these subaltern groups. 
 Including narratives focusing on the experiences 
and agency of subaltern classes in general seems to 
be among the central challenges of writing about the 
genocide. A broad, anonymous scope and objectivity 
to writing about the genocide can explain the 
meta-processes behind why and how the genocide 
proliferated, but the historical experience of genocide 
will be flattened and not treated with the nuance 
and dignity it deserves without a social historical 
approach. This approach, one that is central to my 
paper, rewrites the voiceless back into the historical 
narratives by disentangling them from dominant 
narratives of larger institutions and nation states. A 
century after the Armenian Genocide, there must be 
an acknowledgement of humanity and empathy in 
telling this story. Because the genocide severed the 
collective and historical memory of the Ottoman-
Armenian people, primary sources such as memoirs, 
oral histories, diaries and other “subjective” first-
hand accounts are integral to the process of writing 
a lost history. Moreover, such a methodology can 
bring into dialogue broader conversations about 
justice, acknowledgement, and reconciliation.
 The historians Ronald Suny, Nazan Maksudyan 
and Keith David Watenpaugh, whose works make 
important contributions to the historiography of the 
genocide today, employed different methodological 
approaches to analyzing facets of the genocide—
the actors involved and the broader social practices 
that were enabled in the process. While Suny 
focused mainly on figures of authority and analyzed 
their motivations that led to the genocide, both 
Watenpaugh and Maksudyan prioritized the study 
of childhood and the experiences of child transfer 
in their works, recognizing that establishing the 
children’s position in the landscape of the genocide 
could lead to a more sophisticated, nuanced 
understanding of this terrible time.
 Ronald Suny synthesizes various secondary 
studies of the genocide in his book, “They Can 
Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History 
of the Armenian Genocide. Published on the one 
hundredth anniversary of the genocide, the book is 
a stand-out among other narratives of the genocide 
for its comprehensive chronological examination of 
the genocide, including the lead-up to the genocide 
and its aftermath. A leading scholar of nationalism, 

ethnic conflict, Armenian history, and Russian 
history, his approach to studying the genocide is 
unique, as it is analyzed through these very lenses. 
For instance, this is evident in his explanation on 
why the Ottomans engaged in genocide. Suny uses 
the concept of “affective disposition,” the emotional 
state of the perpetrators, to illustrate how their panic 
and fear justified their rationale behind annihilating 
the Armenians.3 Suny substantiates this argument 
by relying on extensive Ottoman documentation, 
citing ample Ottoman archival sources, including 
government decrees, telegrams sent by Ottoman 
elite officials which detail massacres of Armenians, 
postwar trial records of Ottoman officials, and 
the memoirs of Kurdish and Turkish perpetrators 
including army commanders. In this, it is clear 
how Suny examines these processes in a top-down 
fashion, from the position of elite government 
decision-makers, such as the Young Turks, Ottoman 
generals, and foreign powers, by tracing their agency 
in the genocide as a way to make sense of the crisis. 
 Suny’s top-down approach contrasts sharply with 
both Watenpaugh and Maksudyan, who center their 
works around a bottom-up approach, investigating 
the social processes of the genocide through the lens 
of the children caught in the genocide, by analyzing 
the lived experiences of childhood and child transfer. 
Watenpaugh, in his journal article, “‘Are There Any 
Children for Sale?’: Genocide and the Transfer of 
Armenian Children,” recognized that the study of 
child transfer and recovery was indeed essential 
in understanding the history of human rights as it 
developed post-genocide. This is reflective of his 
position as a leading American historian of the 
contemporary Middle East, human rights, and 
modern humanitarianism, as well as an expert on the 
Armenian Genocide. Critically, this article locates 
the historical discussion of child transfer in the field 
of human rights history as a point of departure for 
understanding the twentieth-century elaboration of 
child-centered human rights practices and norms, 
including the conundrum of what was in the best 
interests of the child.4  

3 Ibid., xx. 
4 Keith David Watenpaugh, “‘Are There Any Children for 
Sale?’: Genocide and the Transfer of Armenian Children 
(1915–1922),” Journal of Human Rights 12, no. 3 (2013): 
286. 



Through the Lens of Childhood: An Alternative Examination of the Armenian Genocide

Aisthesis      Volume 10,  201959

 Watenpaugh draws from the scholarship of other 
Armenian intellectuals with a first-person account 
of surviving genocide from journalist and satirist 
Yervant Odian (1865-1926). Odian’s memoir, which 
Watenpaugh consulted, paid particular attention to 
the trafficking of Armenian adolescent girls who 
had been seized from their families and placed into 
Turkish households, where they endured forced 
religious conversations and domestic and sexual 
abuse.5  Later, Watenpaugh complements his focus on 
childhood experiences by drawing from international 
lawmakers who are better able to elucidate the 
shifting concept of children’s rights. Among the 
lawyers he gains insight from is Venezuelan lawyer 
Victor M. Pérez Peroza, who is quick to compare the 
processes of forced child transfer to a crime of the 
genocide itself, whereas numerous Western scholars 
initially grappled with whether these transfers 
were in fact in the best interests of the children 
and therefore justified.6 Watenpaugh makes an 
interesting analysis here by observing how Peroza, 
using a non-Western perspective and drawing from 
his personal experiences and study of colonialist 
processes, connected Western assumptions of 
prioritizing the child’s presumed best interests with a 
Western superiority ideal, intending to “civilize” the 
child. Hence, Watenpaugh seamlessly draws from 
various interdisciplinary and transnational research 
on studies of childhood during the genocide 
to conceptualize bigger thematic processes of 
modernization and a Western superiority complex 
that was reminiscent of the time. 
 While Watenpaugh foregrounds the agency 
of the children and orphans displaced and housed 
in orphanages during the First World War in his 
research, there is a level of detachment from his 
subjects that social historian Nazan Maksudyan 
harnesses, as seen in her book Orphans and Destitute 
Children in the Late Ottoman Empire. The book 
focuses on the various facets and experiences of 
late Ottoman childhood at the micro-levels of 
shelter: the home, the school, and the international 
orphanages. Maksudyan’s biggest strength and a 
distinctive quality about her writing is her success in 
writing children’s experiences into the social history 
of the Ottoman Empire. Similar to Watenpaugh, 

5 Ibid., 283-284. 
6 Ibid., 289. 

she identifies children as “legitimate historical 
actors who triggered, if not contributed to, the 
emergence of a new, modern social order.”7  She 
does this by drawing from a wide range of primary 
sources, including oral histories and primary 
documents from Ottoman, German, French, and 
Protestant and Catholic missionary archives, as well 
as periodicals and memoirs. In her investigation 
of the Ottoman Empire predating the Armenian 
Genocide, Maksudyan notes that the empire viewed 
children as entities that could be used to preserve 
and further Ottoman agendas. In this regard, 
Maksudyan goes further in-depth into exploring 
the range of institutions of care provided to destitute 
children, specifically vocational state orphanages 
or islahhaneler, developed by Ottoman authorities 
to “reform” and “sterilize” Armenian children in 
attempts to transform them into Turkish children.8  
She raises the ideals of the Ottoman authorities as 
harnessing these institutions and the children within 
them to secure their legitimacy, power, and prestige 
during their crumbling reign.9 Panning out, it is 
not difficult to connect these very ideologies to the 
inception of the genocide. Hence, like Watenpaugh, 
Maksudyan—in her works predating the genocide—
illustrates larger thematic processes of nationalism 
and a burgeoning cultural genocide, harnessed by the 
Ottoman government and humanitarian institutions 
themselves.  
 Both Watenpaugh and Maksudyan complement 
each other by attempting to afford agency to the 
children of the genocide, albeit through different 
mechanisms and with different focuses. They provide 
an alternative reading of Ottoman destitute children 
and orphans’ experiences, contextualizing them in 
the wider picture of social, political and economic 
transformations. By re-centering children and their 
active positions in narratives of the genocide, my 
paper builds on Watenpaugh’s and Maksudyan’s 
methodological approaches. My paper will draw 
from a range of primary sources encompassing 
detailed oral histories of formerly trafficked children, 
as well as memoirs such as Karnig Panian’s Goodbye 
7 Nazan Maksudyan, Orphans and Destitute Children in 
the Late Ottoman Empire (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univer-
sity Press, 2014), 161.
8 Ibid., 80.
9 Ibid., 118. 



Through the Lens of Childhood: An Alternative Examination of the Armenian Genocide

Aisthesis      Volume 10,  201960

Antoura and Bertha Nakshian Ketchian’s In The 
Shadow Of The Fortress: The Genocide Remembered.
My paper proposes to analyze the microcosms of 
“the orphanage industry,” drawing from the lived 
experiences of the children who had been transferred 
to these institutions, and thereby exposing the moral 
collapse of institutions paradoxically intended to 
provide humanitarian relief. I will explore how 
certain deliberate processes within the orphanages, 
such as forced religious conversions and a cultural 
destruction bore generational effects and created 
a culturally-displaced Armenian diaspora post-
genocide. Inspired by Watenpaugh and Maksudyan’s 
skillful integration of the lived experiences 
of children into an analysis of human rights 
developments at the time, I will further investigate 
the paradoxes of the interwar humanitarian sector by 
analyzing its complex roles towards children as well 
as its intersections with processes of nationalism, 
a Western savior complex, and a form of cultural 
genocide. 

The Perilous Journey: Deportation and 
Displacement Through the Eyes of the Child
 At the beginning of The Cut, Manoogian and his 
daughters are walking through their hometown of 
Mardin, when they spot a crane soaring in the air. 
Manoogian points it out to his daughters, telling them 
that seeing a crane symbolizes that they are going 
to go on a big journey soon. One of his daughters 
then asks, “All three of us?” And he replies, “Yes, all 
three of us. All together.” The moment stands out 
as yet another skillful filmmaking choice on Akin’s 
part in foreshadowing the massive displacement and 
deportation that Armenians endured and playing 
upon the heartbreaking innocence of this “journey” 
that the family thinks they are about to embark on.  
 Crucial to the lived experiences of children 
during the genocide are motifs of travel, fleeing, 
and displacement. During the tumultuous interwar 
climate, entire villages, cities, and swaths of 
farmlands were desecrated and men were often 
killed or conscripted into labor, leaving women and 
children displaced and sent to poorly-conditioned 
refugee camps and settlements. Genocide survivor 
Bertha Nakshian Ketchian details her childhood 
memories of “the Death March into the desert” 
in her memoir In the Shadow of the Fortress: The 
Genocide Remembered. Ketchian’s vivid memories 

experiencing the horrors of the genocide alongside 
her mother and sister come across through her 
narrative ability that captures the essence of being 
a young girl caught in the tragedy.10 Preserved 
in her memoir is the innocence and untainted 
impressions of her experiences, such as witnessing 
her grandmother cry for the first time, prompting 
the innocent childhood response, “Do grandmothers 
cry?”11 She also details vivid accounts of vagrancy in 
the desert and the experiences of clinging to hope 
together with other uprooted Armenians on their 
journey into the unknown. 
 Karnig Panian’s memoir Goodbye, Antoura also 
describes the desert and Panian’s experiences of 
being deported as a child in 1915 and ultimately 
deposited at a refugee camp in Hama (present-
day Syria), where his mother and siblings died of 
starvation. “My loneliness was suffocating me,” 
Panian recalls of his experience during these 
travels to and time at this camp.12 The deaths 
and deprivation endemic to this camp eventually 
compelled Panian’s grandparents to send him away 
to institutional care, first an orphanage in Hama, 
and then to the orphanage at Antoura (present-day 
Lebanon). On a deeper level, these few personal and 
unfiltered first-hand accounts are also reminiscent 
of the experiences of thousands of other Armenian 
children who endured the same struggles. This 
retelling of genocide narratives through childhood 
memories help to emphasize the beginnings of 
trauma encountered by these young and vulnerable 
individuals. For children of the genocide, the 
rootlessness and vagrancy they encountered during 
these displacements became a unified generational 
experience. Their temporal, undefined status in the 
vast deserts and refugee camps, as a mere number 
out of many, would eventually serve as an important 
factor as to how their identities were able to be 
reconstructed and manipulated by the Ottoman 
authorities in institutions.

10 Bertha Nakshian Ketchian, In the Shadow of the Fortress: 
The Genocide Remembered (Cambridge, MA: Zoryan Inst. 
for Contemporary Armenian Research and Documenta-
tion, 1988), 17.
11 Ibid., 20.
12 Karnig Panian, Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the 
Armenian Genocide (Stanford, CA: Stanford University 
Press, 2016), 57. 



Through the Lens of Childhood: An Alternative Examination of the Armenian Genocide

Aisthesis      Volume 10,  201961

Transferals: From Desert to Institution 
 In Panian’s Goodbye, Antoura, he vividly recalls 
the day he was separated from his grandparents to 
be sent to an orphanage. In an emotional, raw scene 
that he recalls with explicit detail, his grandmother’s 
pleas for the family to stay together strike a chord 
among many Armenian families and introduce the 
concept of institutions picking up where parental 
units left off.  “I don’t want him taken away,” he 
recalls his grandmother crying. “I know we’re going 
hungry, I know we have no water, but it’s better to die 
together. Better than separation!”13

 Orphanages proliferated in the Ottoman-ruled 
Middle East, specifically in present-day Lebanon 
and Turkey, aiming to provide subsistence to the 
thousands of abandoned and displaced Armenian 
children, as well as to children whose guardians were 
coerced into believing that they had no other option 
besides institutionalizing their children. Many of 
these orphanages were run and managed by local 
Ottoman authorities, but there were also orphanages 
that were set up by British, French and American 
missionaries who each had separate agendas for 
the children they housed. In their compilation, 
Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide, 
Donald E. Miller and Lourna Touryan Miller 
trace the process of transfer of child to institution 
and powerfully evoke the retelling of this process 
through the hundreds of interviews they conducted 
with genocide survivors who were children living 
in institutions at the time. The oral histories detail 
processes of transfer, or the “gathering” of orphans 
and other displaced children from their temporary 
transit homes into mass institutions. Recalling her 
first evening in an orphanage, one survivor-child 
recalled to the Millers, “Some were crying, some 
were confused. There was no food. No beds. I didn’t 
know anyone.”14 The survivor accounts continue to 
detail recollections of how children adapted to their 
new lives in these orphanages, describing poor food 
and social conditions. 
      As the memoir Goodbye, Antoura’s title suggests, 
Panian’s time at the orphanage at Antoura was 
devastating. He describes genuine acts of terror and 

13 Panian, Goodbye, Antoura, 65. 
14 Donald Earl Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survi-
vors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley, 
CA: Univ. of California Press, 1999), 124.

brutality carried out by Ottoman Turkish authorities 
at the orphanage, including detailed accounts of 
starvation and severe punishment. In particular, he 
details having been slapped across the face and kicked 
in his sides by the headmaster of the institution until 
he fell unconscious after stating his Armenian name 
instead of the Turkish name he had been assigned. 
The days that followed forced Panian to endure acute 
suffering and cruelty: he was deprived of medical 
care and food at his weakest and most vulnerable 
state, confessing that he would sleep for most of the 
time because he “just didn’t want to be awake.”15

 Additionally, it was these institutions’ attempt 
to erase a collective Armenian cultural entity 
that revealed systemic ways in which a form of 
cultural genocide was furthered through the 
institutionalization of displaced children. For 
instance, the linguistic restrictions that the orphanage 
authorities imposed upon the children struck Panian 
significantly. In a number of accounts, he describes 
the insistence on linguistic conformity to Turkish in 
the classroom as a contradictory experience. While 
at times students suffered pitiless beatings and severe 
verbal abuse, at other times, attempts to convince the 
children to speak Turkish were made with saccharine 
sweetness and gentle persuasion. Several of the more 
“motherly” female teachers would use sweet and 
kind voices to say, “Speak Turkish, boys. Turkish is 
a beautiful language.”16 The Ottoman government’s 
ploy to build a generation of “Turkified” children 
and preserve their legacy seeped into the classroom, 
a place where the government could implement new 
educational ideas through a variety of means.  
 Panian, reminiscing from the vantage point 
of an adult, wrote, “Clearly, Jemal Pasha’s plan was 
to Turkify us, but we were determined to resist—
not out of rabid nationalism, for which we were 
too young, but simply because we wanted to hold 
on to our identities, which were all we had left.”17 
Narratives of identity construction and nationalism 
have typically been observed from the perspectives 
of adults and framed from the position of elites in 
society. Through memoirs like Panian’s that signal 
these broader processes through lived experiences, 
one is forced to reflect on what the shedding of an 

15 Panian, Goodbye, Antoura, 80-81.
16 Ibid., 89. 
17 Ibid., 83.  



Fig. 1 American Committee for Relief in the Near East 
(Near East Relief) poster, Lest They Perish: Campaign 
for $30,000,000 (Poster by W. B. King, 1917. New York, 
Conwell Graphic Companies. Retrieved from the Library 
of Congress.)

Through the Lens of Childhood: An Alternative Examination of the Armenian Genocide

Aisthesis      Volume 10,  201962

Armenian identity and culture meant to children. 
There is a raw vulnerability in his admission that his 
identity and self were all he that he possessed and a 
subtle emotional grit in its undertones—a resilience 
to preserve his identity and sense of self with all his 
might.  This, along with several other instances of 
childhood resistance that the children—especially 
those who were older—at Antoura displayed, 
signaled a narrative of resistance and a maturity that 
is often not considered in discussing of the genocide 
through the lens of children. 
 While agency of the children and their 
experiences should always be at the forefront, it is 
also worth drawing from sources that impacted the 
lives of these children, such as propaganda tools and 
alternative voices of power that commanded control 
over the children in the orphanages. Examples of 
such perspectives included the voices of Jemal Pasha, 
a military ruler and the founder of the orphanage 
at Antoura, and the eminent Turkish feminist and 
directress of the orphanage, Halide Edip. Numerous 
propaganda tools, namely posters and photographs 
that were recovered from The League of Nations and 
relief organizations that sustained the orphanages 
and their capitalistic proceedings, also offered an 
alternative narrative to the way children’s lives were 
controlled and manipulated during the genocide. 
Additionally, they signified the entry of foreign 
entities into the Ottoman space, in pushing forward 
specific Ottoman agendas or their own, under the 
guise of humanitarianism.

The Humanitarian Sector: A Vessel for 
Institutionalized Cultural Genocide
 Posters like the one displayed in Figure 1 
emphasized the vulnerability of Armenian women 
and children and were employed by Western 
humanitarian organizations to generate political and 
monetary support for relief programs. It showcases 
vivid pathos-invoking imagery depicting a woman 
and a child, members of the subaltern classes whose 
stories received the least attention post-genocide, 
coupled with a tag in bold requesting hefty donations 
for aid and relief. These posters functioned as a 
facet of the larger concept of the “humanitarian 
industry,” a profit-maximizing, capitalistic entity 
that defined the ethics of the interwar humanitarian 
sector at the time. The blatant capitalistic impulses 

that governed the sector and the actors behind 
them can be intrinsically linked to a larger theme 
of Western imperialistic sentiments that defined the 
humanitarian sector at the time. 
 In the orphanage in Antoura, Jemal Pasha 
and Halide Edip employed their connections to 
the foreign aid sector—Pasha, through his status 
within the Ottoman government had clout, while 
Edip herself had been a product of the American 
missionary educational project in the state.18 Yet 
ultimately, both Pasha and Edip saw their roles in the 
orphanage sector as a manifestation of an Ottoman 
“civilizing” mission to create modern Turkish citizens 
and relinquish Armenian identities. The process of 
“Turkification” as it was called, coupled with these 
strategic propaganda tools, pushed forth nationalistic 
18 Panian, Goodbye, Antoura, xii. 



Through the Lens of Childhood: An Alternative Examination of the Armenian Genocide

Aisthesis      Volume 10,  2019

agendas under the protection of humanitarianism, 
truly defining the orphanage sector’s position as an 
industry. The discourse surrounding an intention to 
“civilize” or “Turkify” displaced Armenian children 
parallels that of the rhetoric of Western humanitarian 
organizations that claimed to serve “the best interests 
of the child.” In his article “‘Are There Any Children 
for Sale?’”, Watenpaugh is firm about classifying the 
institutionalization of children as an actual sub-
process of the genocide. Instead of downplaying 
its impact by considering it a mere feature of 
modernization, Watenpaugh offers a new lens 
through which to view the interwar humanitarian 
sector. Here, Watenpaugh’s years of research on 
this material serve as a seminal springboard for 
discussions about the Western humanitarian sector 
as a vehicle for cultural genocide, as the development 
of human rights parameters were governed by a 
system that inherently furthered an ongoing cultural 
genocide. 
 In evaluating the historiography of 
humanitarianism, it is important to recognize 
that it has largely been a narrative told from the 
perspective of Western do-gooders. Distinguishing 
modern humanitarianism as a particular form, 
phase, and “ideology of organized compassion,” 
Watenpaugh designates it a “phenomenon of late 
colonialism” of the late interwar period, informed 
by ideologies of race, ethnicity, and nation in his 
book Bread From Stones.19 Essentially, interwar 
humanitarianism as a concept naturally emerged 
out of cultural, religious, and political ideologies and 
agendas—not just the extent of people’s suffering. 
A question that Watenpaugh poses throughout his 
book is about how the suffering of certain kinds of 
people—mainly non-Muslims—became a focus for 
Western humanitarians.20 It was, after all, Christian 
missionaries who introduced to the American public 
the plight of Armenian children, framed as pious 
Christian victims that needed rescuing. The fact that 
Christians were “unstranger,” as he calls it, was clearly 
important in Western relief motivations.21 Therefore, 
19 Keith David Watenpaugh, Bread from Stones: The Mid-
dle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism 
(Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 4, 
179-180.
20 Ibid., 14.
21 Ibid., 14, 19.

a reframing of the way the system operated on the 
whole, begs a consideration of humanitarianism 
besides mere moral, humanist, and sympathetic 
moves. The entrance and aid of Western humanitarian 
organizations and the practice of human rights in 
the interwar period was paradoxical, in that their aid 
was tainted by strategic colonial impulses. This on 
the whole supported a larger cultural genocide that 
impacted young Armenian members of society. 

Conclusion
 The lived experiences of subaltern groups during 
war and genocide—for various reasons and with 
differing techniques—has been largely downplayed 
by various state and foreign powers in understanding 
a comprehensive truth about historical events. 
Processes such as the forced transfer of children into 
abusive orphanages demonstrated the paradoxes of 
interwar humanitarianism during the Armenian 
genocide: these orphanages provided subsistence 
to thousands of displaced Armenian children while 
enabling horrific abuses and furthering a cultural 
genocide of the diaspora. Acknowledging these 
processes is a step in the right direction in building 
upon the unfinished research of children’s social 
narratives, primarily in exploring their significance 
to the state as social capital, culture and the subjects 
of intense interest in the preservation of state 
ideologies. At its crux, the study of childhood in the 
Armenian diaspora should become part of a global 
conversation about the nature of suffering and 
humanity and should reexamine the development 
of the humanitarian sector as a response to the 
traumatic series of events that unfolded in 1915. 
      Panian’s Goodbye, Antoura was originally published 
in Armenian in 1992; however, his daughters 
wanted to have their father’s memoir read by a new 
generation of Armenians and non-Armenians. The 
Stanford University Press published the English 
translation of the memoir in 2015, marking the 
100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. The 
Introduction and Afterword were both written 
by Professor Keith David Watenpaugh, whose 
academic career reflects his longtime commitment 
to human rights and genocide studies as well as the 
exploration of subaltern narratives in history. In 
the book, Panian himself succinctly summarized 
the predicament of his fellow memoir-writers when 

63



Through the Lens of Childhood: An Alternative Examination of the Armenian Genocide

Aisthesis      Volume 10,  2019

he wrote of his orphaned compatriots, “All that 
was left of our families and hometowns were our 
memories.”22 By translating and publishing this text 
in 2015, Goodbye, Antoura joins a growing number 
of memoirs originally written in Armenian that have 
been translated into English and published in recent 
years that facilitates accessibility to a wide audience. 
 Still, translating memoirs such as Goodbye, 
Antoura is only the first step in the process of writing 
a lost history. Panian and Ketchian’s memoirs belong 
to an emerging body of Armenian literature of human 
rights that offer an unflinching look at humanity 
from the perspectives of humanity’s most vulnerable 
members, in a way that could, and should, raise 
further questions on restorative justice and projects 
for peace and reconciliation. Moving forward, 
the study of the genocide must be prioritized and 
funded more ambitiously in both Armenia and in 
the diaspora so scholars and non-scholars can access 
the rich and untapped memoirs and memories that 
remain uncollected, unpublished, and unread.

22 Panian, Goodbye, Antoura, 75.

Bibliography
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