The Memory Generation

Episode 7: Naré Mkrtchyan (w/ Armin Wegner)

INTRO

Rachael Cerrotti: Hey Everyone, I’m Rachael Cerrotti. Welcome to The Memory Generation – a podcast about the memories we inherit and the stories that are passed from one generation to the next. 

Today we have something a bit different for you. We are starting with a short piece that was produced last year together with Stephen Smith - the co-creator of this show. You may remember Stephen from episode 3 of this podcast where he joined me to talk all about testimony and his work as an oral historian. 

Stephen is going to introduce you to Armin Wegner. Armin was born in Germany in 1886. As a soldier, he became a witness to the genocide of the Armenians during the First World War - and then stood up to Hitler about the persecution of the Jews in 1933. Armin Wegner may not be well-known today, but we want to tell you his story because it is both important and rare. It’s a story about someone who could not accept the silence and ignorance that has often shrouded the legacy of  the Armenian genocide.  Armin would end up spending most of his life living in exile because of his choice to speak out.

After you hear Stephen tell the story of Armin – you will hear a conversation between me and filmmaker Naré Mkrtchyan who is the granddaughter of Armenian Genocide survivors. Together, Armin and Naré’s stories shed light on the repercussions of generations-long denial and silence.  

So, to start, here is Stephen Smith with the story of Armin Wegner. 

EPISODE

Armin Wegner: I came in Turkey as a member of the German Red Cross.

Stephen Smith: I came in Turkey as a member of the German Red Cross.

Armin Wegner: I came through the whole desert of Mesopotamia. 

Stephen Smith: I came through the whole desert of Mesopotamia. 

Armin Wegner: And was a witness of the terrible persecution of the poor Armenian people.

Stephen Smith: And was a witness of the terrible persecution of the poor Armenian people, and saw the terrible sacrifice.

Armin Wegner: And saw the terrible sacrifice.

Stephen: That’s the voice of Armin Wegner witness to the genocide of the Armenians.  I’m Stephen Smith with a special episode about the life and legacy of journalist, author, documentarian and humanitarian, Dr. Armin T. Wegner. 

Armin Wegner: A witness is a very difficult task. I could never more forget what I have seen. I was always willing to speak of this terrible thing and to say to the peoples that the same terrible thing can repeat.

Stephen Smith: The desert of Anatolia is in southeast Turkey and North Syria. Back in 1915 during the First World War, it was where genocide took place. Under the cover of war and after decades of pre-genocidal attacks, Turks killed Armenians and removed them from their historical lands. Armin Wegner was in his late twenties at this time and a staunch pacifist. But all German men, even the pacifists, fought for their country. And being that the Germans had allied themselves with the Ottoman Empire, Armin was dispatched to Anatolia as a member of the German Red Cross.

Armin Wegner: I came in Turkey in April, nineteen hundred and fifteen. 

Stephen Smith: As a member of the Sanitary Crops, Armin carried a stretcher instead of a gun and wore a Turkish Red Cross uniform. That’s what allowed him to witness the life and death of the Armenians who were imprisoned in refugee camps. 

Armin Wegner: As an officer of the Turkish Army for the wounded soldiers I had no difficulty to enter the camps.

Stephen Smith: While in these camps, Armin also carried a camera. 

Armin Wegner: And I make many photographs.  

Stephen Smith: You have to remember, cameras were a relatively new technology at that time and just becoming available to the average person. Armin knew the army didn’t allow photographs because any documented scenes could incriminate them. But he didn’t care. He wanted the evidence. 

Armin Wegner: And always I tried to do and to write of this terrible thing.

Stephen Smith: He had seen the Turks lead the Armenians on death marches. He saw them take the starved, the thirsty, the diseased and the dying deep into the desert. Armin made pictures of makeshift encampments, mass graves, gallows with fresh corpses swinging in the wind, women wrapped in rags carrying bundles of children. 

Armin Wegner: Wives who are absolutely mad to have lost their spirit in consequence of all the difficulties of their life. 

Stephen Smith: He documented the bodies of children laying in the gutter.

Armin Wegner: You see here a dead boy who is dead of hunger and his body are only bones. 

Stephen Smith: And the orphaned children.

Armin Wegner: Lost childrens alone who has lost her parents.

Stephen Smith: By 1923 up to 1.5 million Armenians would be murdered in one of the first genocides of the 20th century. During the First World War, as the number of Armenians murdered was mounting up, Armin Wegner tried to tell the story of what was happening to them. He went to foreign embassies in hopes of getting his evidence to Germany and the United States, but when his efforts were discovered, the Turks demanded the Germans arrest him and Armin was sent to work in the cholera wards of Baghdad. It was there that he fell seriously ill and by the end of 1916, he was sent back to Germany. His photographs came home with him. He smuggled them across borders in the back of a large belt buckle and once home, he tried to get his reports published in different newspapers to no avail.

Armin Wegner: But the newspapers has been afraid because the Germans has been allied with the Turks. 

Stephen Smith: After the war, he wrote an open letter to President Woodrow Wilson. That was in 1919.

Armin Wegner: I have written a long letter in which I have declared all what I have seen.

Stephen Smith: Armin Wegner was a convinced socialist and increasingly curious about the new ideological experiment that was unfolding in the Soviet Union. In 1927, he was invited to Moscow by the Communist regime to attend the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution. Armin traveled by train with other writers and journalists and wrote a travel log of his impressions. That journal would later be published as a best selling book. His support of communism left him quickly though. While he began describing Moscow as wearing a red crown and glorified the hanging of the red flags that supported the regime, after some time his tone shifted and he was describing Leningrad as gloomy, heavy and with a great sadness. In his book, he foresaw the violent years of Stalin yet to come. He wrote: “Like a lover who recognizes the shortcomings of his beloved… Forget about the Communist empire. That millennial state as we dreamed of it will not happen.”

His book was a bestseller in Germany in 1929. Armin’s cry against communism came just one year before the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, that’s the Nazis, increased their seats in the German parliament from just 12 to 107. 

A few years after those seats were gained, Hitler came to power. He very quickly turned Germany’s democracy into a dictatorship, opened concentration camps and called for anti-Jewish boycotts. Armin’s experience of what he witnessed in Armenia came flooding back as he saw what was happening to the Jews in Germany and so once again he picked up his pen to fight against persecution. This time, he wrote an open letter to Adolf Hitler imploring him to stop persecuting the Jews. And again, no newspaper would publish it. So, instead he sent it to the Nazi headquarters and demanded it be forwarded to Hitler. In a six-page letter dated April 11, 1933, Armin writes: “I was not endowed with the gift of speech merely to make myself an accomplice by remaining silent.” 

This is 1933. It’s five years before Kristallnacht. It’s eight years before the first mass shootings of the Einsatzgruppen. A decade before Jews were being murdered in the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. And, twelve years before Berlin was reduced to rubble. And yet, in this letter, Armin writes to Hitler: “One day, should towns be just a heap of rubble, should the race die out, should voices of tolerance be silenced forever, the mountains of our fatherland would still rise to the sky and the eternal forests would rustle on. But they would no longer breathe our fathers’ air, that of freedom and justice. With shame and scorn they would tell of a race that not only thoughtlessly jeopardized the destiny of the country but also brought eternal dishonor upon its memory.” 

After sending the letter, Armin was arrested by the Gestapo. He was beaten unconscious and spent a year in several concentration camps as a political prisoner. When released, he fled Germany for Italy and took a new name. That’s where he lived until he died in 1978. 

Armin Wegner used his camera to document the Armenian genocide. He stood in court in 1921 to confirm that he had seen the genocide with his own eyes. He wrote to presidents in his own country and abroad. He was a man who was humble enough to reverse his own political idealism when he realized that Communism would cost many lives. And, he pleaded in a letter to Hitler not to murder the Jews.

It’s likely Armin died feeling a failure.  He did not succeed in preventing the Armenian genocide, nor the brutality of Stalinism, nor did he prevent the Holocaust - but Armin Wegner never stopped trying. Feeling the weight of history his headstone in Rome reads: ‘I loved justice and hated iniquity. Therefore I die in exile.’ 

—

Rachael Cerrotti: That was oral historian Stephen Smith with the story of Armin Wegner. The tape of Armin that you heard is part of USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. It was filmed in Rome in 1972 by Armenian Genocide Survivor and documentarian Michael Hagoppian. The music from that piece is from Blue Dot Sessions.

For over a century, the Armenian Genocide has been debated and denied. Joe Biden is the first American president to call it as such and that came over 100 years after it took place. Even though this genocide was over a century ago, how we talk about it matters - even to this day 

To learn about how it feels to come from a history long denied, I spoke with Armenian filmmaker Nare Mkrtchyan. Nare’s film, The Other Side of Home, tells the story of a Turkish woman named Maya who learns that her great grandmother was a survivor of the Armenian Genocide. The film wrestles with questions about identity and denial while sharing windows into both Nare and Maya’s complicated relationship to their pasts. The Other Side of Home was the first film about the Armenian Genocide to have been shortlisted for an Oscar. 

I was introduced to Nare at the start of the pandemic. An acquaintance, who happened to be a professional matchmaker told us we ought to be friends. I was a granddaughter of the Holocaust working with memory and Nare was the granddaughter of the Armenian genocide, also working with memory. 

Nare mainly lives in Los Angeles, but was raised in Armenia. As a child, she lived through the First Nagorno-Karabakh War which was between Armenia and Azerbaijan. That war ended in 1994. She has spent the past couple years back in Armenia to do documentary work after the conflict broke out again in 2020. 

We recorded this conversation on May 5th, 2022 through Zoom. I was in Portland, Maine and Nare was in Yerevan, Armenia.

NARÉ INTERVIEW

Rachael Cerrotti: We were actually introduced through a matchmaker because we both are interested in stories of genocide which feels like the least romantic way to be matched up with somebody. 

Naré Mkrtchyan: I know right.

Rachael Cerrotti: That was like at the very beginning of the pandemic, I believe. I had already put out my podcast about my family history. And you had produced your movie that dug into your family history a bit, which kind of just allowed us to be totally open and vulnerable with each other from the get go.

Naré Mkrtchyan: That's right. Yes. And I remember as I was listening to your podcast, I was feeling like it was my own family's history even though you were talking about Holocaust and I was talking about the Armenian genocide.

Rachael Cerrotti: So can you tell us a bit about your family's experience during that time?

Naré Mkrtchyan: Yes. So I don't really remember my grandparents talking about the genocide. And I often blamed my mom for not asking, but as I embarked on my journey with my documentary about the Armenian genocide and I started learning more and more, I realized that it wasn't my mother's fault. People who deal with such trauma, sometimes they just don't want to talk about it. So unfortunately, there's very little that I know about our family history when it comes to 1915, but I remember my mother telling me that my grandmother's family was rescued by their Turkish neighbors because my great grandfather was a musician that was very much respected in the town. Those people risked their lives and they kept my grandma alive. 

Rachael Cerrotti: How old was your grandmother around this time?

Naré Mkrtchyan: She was very young, maybe three years old and this family that saved them was telling them, You cannot speak Armenian or your tongues will be cut off. So many grandma, she was speaking Turkish a lot of the time. And the words of my childhood, the words of endearment are in Turkish and it's very interesting to me that the language that is considered my enemy language is also the most endearing because it's so deeply connected to my childhood. My grandpa's family, they were all killed by the Turks, so my grandpa, he was raised as an orphan. And they remember that what always interested me, I guess as a child that really stayed and stuck with me from the whole genocide story is going to sound funny. But to me, the most tragic thing was at the time that my grandpa did not know when his birthday was. Because he was a baby when the genocide happened. So he actually had no idea when he was born. And if you ask me, like what memory I have from genocide, to me that was the main memory as a child because my grandparents and my parents, they didn't really instill the genocide in me. Growing up, I myself started embarking on that journey and trying to find healing for myself. I think in a way I inherited it, but then it became my life. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Your family roots are from what is now eastern Turkey. But at that time it was Western Armenia. And you went back to this region as a filmmaker when you were making your film, The Other Side of Home. Was that the first time you visited that place?

Naré Mkrtchyan: Yes. It was my first time visiting Turkey. But what's interesting is that as I was landing in Turkey, I actually could feel like a complete paranoia. I had no idea where it was coming from. You know, I always heard that we inherited it in our DNA. The trauma. But I actually was not believing it until I felt it. And it was very unpleasant because I usually love taking risks and I love going to insane places to film, so I usually am a courageous person. And it was kind of ridiculous to me that I was sitting on a plane with my two American cinematographers. Absolutely safe. Nothing threatening my life. And I was feeling so horrified as the plane was landing in Turkey. And I didn't know where the fear was coming from. 

Rachael Cerrotti: When you and I bonded right away over carrying these very heavy, inherited memories which originated in the early decades of the 20th century, we also had to acknowledge that there's a really big difference in what our families went through. From a memory perspective because while yeah, there are a few deniers here and there of the Holocaust – the Holocaust is like seared into collective memory globally in a sense as a genocide. Like anyone compares anything awful and terrible to Hitler or the Nazis - in a very serious way, in a comedic way, like it's just part of public dialogue. And that's so different for the Armenian genocide. I mean, polar opposites. So I'm wondering how has that silence and how that refusal of memory – how has that impacted you personally?

Naré Mkrtchyan: It's painful. It's horrifying. And actually, when I made the Armenian genocide documentary and they went to Turkey to make the film, I was trying to find a closure, a feeling for myself because being a grandchild of survivors of the Armenian genocide, I lived with the lie that the world didn't know. But it was a lie. The world knew.

Rachael Cerrotti: And you understood that when you were young. 

Naré Mkrtchyan: And I understood that. Yes. 

Rachael Cerrotti: That it was being denied.

Naré Mkrtchyan: yes. I really want to ask you, how do you feel to know that what your ancestors went through is actually at least recognized by the world? It's not denied. Does it make the pain a bit easier? 

Rachael Cerrotti: Umm, you know, I don't know what it feels like the other way, but I would imagine, yes. And, because it's recognized and so well known, you then become almost the defender of it in a different way, right. We hear, even when American politics gets heated, the quickest, most common way for anybody to make anything sound dramatic is to put some sort of comparison to the Holocaust. You see it with COVID and vaccine cards. You see it in, you know, all types of places. We see it with kids on the southern border being taken from their parents in America and put into these cages and we're calling them concentration camps. And whether or not it's appropriate comparisons or use of language or whatever, like, that's neither here nor there for this question. But because those are the quickest comparisons and the most dramatic comparisons. I think it's defending your history or carrying your history in a very different way that has a certain type of pain and fear that comes with it. It's just very different than the pain and fear you have. I think for any of us, when we feel seen, when we feel known, when we feel understood, some of the pain does, umm, it does feel a little bit gentler.

Naré Mkrtchyan: I remember reading about meeting between Holocaust survivor’s child and Nazis’ child. And the child of the Nazi perpetrator asks for forgiveness from the son of the Holocaust survivor. And I remember that it made me cry so hard. And I remember that for me, it was like I was kind of trying to steal that. Not stealing it in a bad way. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Yeah. To have some of it for yourself. As you were talking, I was thinking, I've never even desired an apology as a granddaughter of the Holocaust. I've never actually stopped to think about, oh, I want an apology. And, you know, you asked me that question of – 

Naré Mkrtchyan: How does it feel? 

Rachael Cerrotti: Yeah, of how does it feel? And I'm wondering if the reason I've never even thought to desire an apology is because it's always been acknowledged. So it never felt needed. It felt like the acknowledgment, I won't call it an apology, but it was enough as a granddaughter. I don't know if my mother would agree and I definitely don't know if any survivor would agree with that. Probably not. But Germany has been one of the prime examples of a country acknowledging what they did wrong. 

Naré Mkrtchyan: I fully understand it, though. I completely understand. But for example, when I was making The Other Side of Home, I was interviewing a lot of people to edit the documentary and all these people were coming who were technically good and they were asking me questions like, it's been 100 years after the genocide - why do you care? Why does recognition even matter? But what was also interesting while I was interviewing all these editors is that I realized that nobody can understand my pain as much as the Jewish people will on a dna level. So I consciousnessly started looking for a Jewish editor. 

Rachael Cerrotti: So I spent some time in Armenia many moons ago. I was working for a lot of travel programs, so I would take teenagers abroad on like cultural immersion and leadership development programs. And one summer I took, like, 15 American kids to Armenia for a month. You know, we did a lot of, like, volunteerism type of work. And I remember the very first day, we're sitting around this big table. Every meal is like a huge feast. And I'm chatting with, you know, my  Armenian colleagues - who are you, who are you, you know. And when I said I was Jewish, the reception that I received from them, their interest in who I was, their appreciation of me being there, was unlike anything I had received in any other country because there was this immediate connection that they felt with me because they knew all about the Holocaust. And it was just such a profound experience to feel seen by someone who was different than me, you know.

Naré Mkrtchyan: Yeah, because I remember even our first conversation. That's exactly how I felt like being fully seen by someone who is different from me and fully understood on a very, very deep level. 

Rachael Cerrotti: And it's different than feeling seen from someone who's similar to you. It's much deeper in a way.

Naré Mkrtchyan: It is. It is much, much deeper. And what's very heartbreaking to me is that there are all these kids today in Armenia, in Azerbaijan, in Russia, in Ukraine, in Syria - who are going to live with war. Because me spending a year here in Armenia and spending time with soldiers, spending four months in the hospital with them, watching them go through amputations, then going back to America. It was so difficult for me because even though I didn't go through the war on myself, the people who were close to me understood that they can never really understand me. They can never understand this experience that I had. 

Rachael Cerrotti: I'm sure that a lot of people listening might not even actually know that there was a war in that region, you know, less than two years ago. So, Can you just give a little background? Can you just give a couple of sentences overview of the conflict?

Naré Mkrtchyan: So the conflict still exists. It's over a region called Nagorno-Karabakh that during the Soviet rule was gifted to Azerbaijan even though it was considered an indigenous Armenian land. And as the Soviet Union started falling apart, the people who lived in Nagorno-Karabakh started asking to return to Armenia because Azerbaijan is Muslim. Armenia is Christian country. So the people who lived in Nagorno-Karabakh, they weren't really connecting with Azerbaijan. And in 1994, there was a war between Azerbaijan and Armenia and Armenia won the war. But unfortunately, Nagorno-Karabakh was not recognized as a country by the world. However, it had Armenians living there and in 2020, again, the war had started. And when I was a kid, the first war happened in 1994. And I always thought that I would be the last generation who had to go through cold, absolutely freezing, freezing weather where I was literally wearing more clothes to go to bed than to go outside. There is no food. There is no electricity. And I was feeling like I was the last generation. But now 2020 happened. And a new generation of 18 year olds had to experience that. And now 2022 happened and the generation in Ukraine and Russia is going to live with this for the rest of their lives. And it's just so heartbreaking to me. When we're going to stop doing this to one another. It was very painful. And in 2020 - I pretty much - I sat in a plane and I flew to Armenia and I went to film this gorgeous, beautiful monastery called Tsitsernavank that was being occupied by the Azeri forces at 6 p.m. on that day. And they left the monastery at 5:20 p.m. I was the last Armenian there. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Wow

Naré Mkrtchyan: It was an intense, intense experience because also as risking a lot, everyone was telling me, don't go there. You're not allowed to be there. You will become a prisoner of war. It's extremely dangerous because the Azeri forces, they're saying they're going to go at 6 p.m., that they can stop any time. But somehow I was feeling the need to go. And what's interesting is that while I was there, I started praying like the Armenian prayer just came out from my lips and I don't really pray regularly. It was very interesting that it just came out from my lips and it just, it was a whisper, and it wasn't a prayer. It was more of an ancient vibration. And the recognition that this words, this vibration has envelops this monastery for centuries and these walls will most likely never hear it again. And what I realized as I was going through 14 checkpoints trying to enter Nagorno-Karabakh is that we're not the owners of the land. We are the temporary visitors, but we don't see it. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Mmh. So what are you doing now? What are you working on?

Naré Mkrtchyan: So I’m making a documentary about the war. But the same way that The Other Side of Home was for me, it was more than a genocide documentary. It was more an exploration for me of identity. And with my documentary about war. Again, it's not a Nagorno-Karabakh war documentary. But it is beyond that. I'm trying to explore the topic of war and humanity and the choice that we're given any moment between love and fear. And, what will happen when we choose to go with fear. And, What would happen if we chose more to go with love? 

Rachael Cerrotti: I appreciate that recognition that war is a choice. We are choosing war. 

Naré Mkrtchyan: We are choosing war. And if we can destroy, we can also create. And how beautiful does the soul feel when it creates. How beautiful does it feel to create? But how much more difficult it is to create? Destroying feels so quick. Like destroying is so easy. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Immediate gratification – 

Naré Mkrtchyan: Mmhmm

Rachael Cerrotti: – for those who want to see things destroyed. 

Naré Mkrtchyan: Exactly. It's immediate gratification for the ego. Makes you feel powerful for a second. But imagine if we lived in a world. Where we would choose to create. And I know like sometimes I'm being called someone who believes in the utopian world and umm I want to say, of course, sure, yes, why not? Right. Why not? If we were able to collectively manifest this world, why not dare to manifest the opposite of this? I really hope it. I really hope it's going to happen. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Naré, thank you. I hope that in the years to come that this network of us who are trying to make sense of what our families went through, I hope we grow it together. Because I think as much as us connecting with other individuals who might have intersected with our family's history in some way in the past helps heal us. I think having friendship like yours is healing as well. And I'm just so grateful for it. 

Naré Mkrtchyan: I feel the same way. And I know what you're trying to say is that our matchmaker friend did a great job.

Rachael Cerrotti: She did such a good job. So we'll send her a little thank you note and some little gift.

[laughter to fade out]

OUTRO

Rachael Cerrotti: Thank you to Naré for joining me today. We have linked the trailer for her film, The Other Side of Home, on our website. And thank you to Stephen Smith for sharing with us the story of Armin Wegner. 

This podcast was created in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation which is home to more than 55,000 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide – including Armin’s. You can learn more about their work and the Visual History Archive at sfi.usc.edu.

You can find additional links, book lists, testimony clips and all types of other resources and stories on our website: memorygenerationpodcast.com. Our editor is Lene Bech Sillesen. Our executive producer and co-creator of this show is Stephen Smith. The music is from Kodomo.

I’m Rachael Cerrotti. We’ll be back next week.