Hagop Der Balian, Mémoires d’un survivant du génocide des Arméniens: d’Adana à Mossoul
Hagop Der Balian, Mémoires d’un survivant du génocide des Arméniens: d’Adana à Mossoul. Translated by Gladys Der Balian, edited by Raymond H. Kévorkian, Antelias, Lebanon: Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia, 2019, 139 p.
Texte intégral
1Long before the great Parisian shoemaker Sarkis Der Balian was making beautiful footwear for the likes of Marie Curie, Salvador Dali, Greta Garbo, and Jean Anouilh, he watched his sister die of foot gangrene from walking unshod on a forced march in Cilicia in 1915-1916. His family’s story within the larger story of the Armenian genocide could have led Sarkis down other career paths – perhaps as a surgeon after watching a brother die of a bowel obstruction from swallowing gold pieces on the same forced march, or as a microbiologist after seeing his parents die of typhus during the same ordeal. The survival of six-year-old Sarkis, another sister and his eldest brother is the gripping story told in Mémoires d’un survivant du génocide des Arméniens: d’Adana à Mossoul (“Memoirs of a Survivor of the Armenian Genocide: From Adana to Mossul”).
- 1 The information in this and the following sentence was provided in e-mail correspondence with Hagop (...)
2On the back cover of the book, we see Sarkis and his surviving sister, Aznive, as healthy, smiling adults. Next to them is a short, balding man who is not smiling. This man of unassuming appearance was Hagop Der Balian, their eldest brother who was 18 or 19 years old during the forced march. Some years after emerging from the blood and cold of the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians during World War I, Hagop penned in Armenian a low-key yet breathless 100-page account of the family’s struggle with obliteration. The French translation is published under the auspices of the Dr. Haroutiun and Véronique Garévorian Foundation and benefits from the efforts of the eminent scholar of the genocide Raymond H. Kévorkian, who edited the text and contributed an introduction that provides essential historical and geographical contexts for Der Balian’s participant account. The book also includes numerous black and white period photos of sites relating to the genocide along with photos of the Der Balian family. A map including the paths of forced marches is also useful, even if the text is too small to read without a magnifying glass. Contrary to what is stated on the title page, Hagop’s daughter, Gladys, “facilitated” the smooth and idiomatic French translation; she did not translate it herself.1 However, Gladys, not Georges as stated in the text, did write the helpful four-page epilogue providing contextual information about the Der Balian family.
3Before the outbreak of World War I, Hagop, the eldest of five Der Balian children, had been a bright student in Aintab (Gaziantep) who had quit school in order to work and help the family. Prospects were better in Adana so his father, a coppersmith, took the family to that city. They knew about the 1909 massacre of Armenians in Adana, but work was plentiful, and the family prospered. Then, on a May night in 1915, armed men swept through the city announcing seferberlik (military mobilization), and within days the family was forcibly deported. Hagop watched his parents die of typhus, and he faced the challenge of keeping himself and his four siblings alive on the forced march that, according to his captors’ stated intention, would kill them all. That he, Aznive, and Sarkis arrived alive in Mosul months later was miraculous and due largely to Hagop’s resourcefulness and refusal to capitulate to circumstances.
- 2 “Tout comme au sortir du portail d’une église, nous parvenons même à nous bousculer dans ces vastes (...)
4There’s much to recommend this book. Those seeking to understand the day-to-day ordeal of life on the forced march will not be disappointed. One is surprised to read that with miles of emptiness all around them, the column is tight with individuals packed together and “jostling each other in these vast spaces”, “just like at the door of a church” (p. 61)2. The reason is that marauders, primarily Bedouins, pick at the column seeking to kidnap girls and women. At one point when the threat to his sister is most acute, Hagop procures a knife, not for self-defense, which would be futile, or for family suicide in extremis, but in order to cut his sister’s hair as part of a strategy to make her look like a boy; he then finds a way to keep her always in the middle of the column.
5Those looking for participant accounts of the relations between torturers and victimizers will find numerous instances. Faced with the guards’ greed and unchecked brutality, the Der Balian children survive by anticipating threats and responding flexibly from their position of vulnerability and desperation. Having paid a sum to a guard in order to escape summary execution, Hagop knows the guard will be back, so he procures women’s clothing as a disguise. Another time, he is cracking the shell of a turtle to eat raw when he’s stung by a horsewhip across the skull and a guard presents him with a your-money-or-your-life ultimatum. Hagop responds that he wouldn’t be working over the turtle if he had any money and then notes that he is one of five orphans who have done nothing wrong, thereby invoking Divine punishment on he who would knowingly take advantage of orphans (p. 73).
6Perhaps most touching is a leitmotif of Hagop’s periodic despair. He does not witness atrocities with aplomb, nor does he always maintain his composure. But when he is “on the brink of madness” (“aux portes de la démence”), he makes sure that his siblings do not see him weep (p. 49). This is an example of Hagop’s natural gift for storytelling as he depicts mood, here despair, and then deftly reframes it, in this case according to the priority of shielding his siblings.
7The book documents anew the facts of summary execution, kidnapping, forced conversion to Islam, and mass expropriation of wealth and goods of Armenians in Ottoman lands. Hagop describes these horrors in an unadorned style but with a writer’s knack for identifying significant detail. His matter-of-fact account contains no breaks, divisions or subtitles – even the book’s title was added by the editor – yet this spare narrative is riveting. Hagop deftly shows, for example, how objects accompany the children’s itinerary – cleverly hidden coins save the children’s lives more than once, but they also lead to a brother’s, Haroutioun’s, death; clothing-rags are precious against the cold but equally valuable for barter and to disguise the sex of the girls and boys alike depending on the threat encountered. The “literariness” of struggle extends to Hagop’s declaring in Biblical fashion that his sister is his wife in order to save her from kidnap and rape. Hagop’s resourcefulness and determination to save the family seem limitless as he works at a half-dozen occupations, from breaking rocks to selling yogurt, cooking for guards, and letter-writing for the illiterate. As a scribe, Hagop manages to contact charitable Armenians who help the siblings survive when they are utterly exhausted at the end of the forced march.
- 3 “Ô, Cher Lecteur, réfléchis un instant… Le Cœur se fige en pierre, pas une larme ne jaillit. Sous n (...)
8The rare breaks in Hagop’s deadpan style punctuate particularly dire circumstance. He apostrophizes: “O dear reader, think for a moment… The heart turns to stone, not a tear falls. Under our eyes, they slaughter our brothers after inflicting a thousand and one tortures. As soon as they finish, it’ll be our turn…”3 (p. 65). Astonishingly, Hagop seems at least as moved by his own lack of humanity (“not a tear falls”) as by that of torturers. Even punctuation is astutely employed. Hagop’s narrative contains very few exclamation points, for example, but in one place the author states matter-of-factly that the children have to eat grass to survive, adding the incongruous indignity, “without salt!” (p. 57).
9Hagop manifestly felt conscience-bound to write this book some time after the events recounted. The family’s life prior to seferberlik takes barely three pages of the narrative. The ordeal itself, including the two-month-long forced march and months of life in the camps, is recounted carefully and conscientiously, but once he has borne personal witness to the atrocity of genocide, Hagop simply stops writing. He lifts pen from page at the moment in his narrative that he and two of the original seven members of the family are safely in British custody in Mosul. Having acquitted himself of the task of defying oblivion with this text, he is not known to have written anything else throughout his long life until his death in 1972.
10In a personal interview with his son, Georges, this writer learned that Hagop almost never mentioned the genocide or his family’s particular tragedy, yet these events clearly haunted him. Indeed, in the text, upon the death of his youngest sister from what was doubtless septicemia or gangrene during the march, Hagop admits that he “will always be obsessed by the unbearable scene of this little sister, reduced to such a cruel extremity” [“Je resterai toujours obsédé par l’insoutenable tableau de cette petite sœur, réduite à une si cruelle extrémité”] (p. 83). Hagop’s daughter, Gladys, adds only one note to the entire text and it is to confirm that remorse pursued her father throughout his life.
11No review of this book should fail to recognize the attention Professor Kévorkian devoted to it. It is crucial to know, for example, how the Der Balians’ plight fits with the exodus of other Armenian families and populations. Kévorkian’s 13-page introduction and notes throughout the text place the Der Balian expulsion from Adana and the subsequent trek to Mosul in the context of known exilic trails and confirm Hagop’s account. Likewise, the notes provide precious clarification for outdated place names and forgotten events. Among the most useful elements of Kévorkian’s work is the citation of corroborating documentation provided by diplomats stationed in Ottoman lands during the genocide. One may hope that any English translation of these memoirs would include Professor Kévorkian’s notes and introduction.
- 4 Karnig Panian, Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, Stanford, CA: Stanford Universi (...)
- 5 Vahé Tachjian, Daily Life in the Abyss: Genocide Diaries, 1915-1918, (New York: Berghahn, 2017).
12The great contribution of Mémoires d’un survivant du génocide des Arméniens is its first-hand account of surviving the trauma of the genocide. To be sure, it is not the first such account, but it is invaluable in the way that a discovered archaeological object contributes to constructing the history of a given people, period or place. It is an irreplaceable complement to the body of already-available testimonies such as found in Karnig Panian’s Goodbye, Antoura, Kerop Bedoukian’s Some of Us Survived, and Armenian Genocide By Ottoman Turkey, 1915.4 At the same time, this book provides eye-witness participant support for scholarly studies such as Vahé Tachjian’s Daily Life in the Abyss.5 Indeed, for scholars working at the nexus of personal memory and historiography, this book will be a valuable primary source. As time passes, inevitably fewer such authentic testimonies of the genocide will be unearthed. These memoires are therefore unlikely to be supplanted in terms of raw testimonial value and unschooled narrative power any time soon.
13Finally, one comes away from Mémoires d’un survivant du génocide des Arméniens with the sense of having read a deeply humane book. The author is never vindictive or vituperative; he recognizes decency whenever he encounters it, and the pangs of his own conscience are sharper than any condemnation he levels at his captors. For these reasons his book takes a proud place in the literature of testimony and in the struggle for human rights the world over.
Note de fin
1 The information in this and the following sentence was provided in e-mail correspondence with Hagop’s son, Georges Der Balian, 28 Sept. 2019.
2 “Tout comme au sortir du portail d’une église, nous parvenons même à nous bousculer dans ces vastes étendues”.
3 “Ô, Cher Lecteur, réfléchis un instant… Le Cœur se fige en pierre, pas une larme ne jaillit. Sous nos yeux, on abat nos frères de sang après leur avoir fait subir mille et une tortures. Dès qu’ils en auront fini avec eux, ce sera notre tour”.
4 Karnig Panian, Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015; Kerop Bedoukian, Some of Us Survived: The Story of an Armenian Boy, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979; Armenian Genocide By Ottoman Turkey, 1915: Testimony of Survivors, edited by Amatuni Virabyan and Gohar Avagyan, translated by Levon Baghdasaryan, Yerevan: Zangak-97, 2013.
5 Vahé Tachjian, Daily Life in the Abyss: Genocide Diaries, 1915-1918, (New York: Berghahn, 2017).
Haut de pagePour citer cet article
Référence papier
Ken Seigneurie, « Hagop Der Balian, Mémoires d’un survivant du génocide des Arméniens: d’Adana à Mossoul », Études arméniennes contemporaines, 13 | 2021, 241-245.
Référence électronique
Ken Seigneurie, « Hagop Der Balian, Mémoires d’un survivant du génocide des Arméniens: d’Adana à Mossoul », Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 13 | 2021, mis en ligne le 01 septembre 2021, consulté le 16 mai 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/2723 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/eac.2723
Haut de pageDroits d’auteur
Le texte et les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés), sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Haut de page


