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 Akin, Fatih, dir. The Cut. 2014; Germany: Pandora Films, 2014. DVD. Ketchian, Bertha Nakshian.  In the Shadow of the Fortress: The Genocide Remembered. Cambridge, MA: Zoryan Inst. for Contemporary Armenian Research and Documentation, 1988. 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