Armenian Genocide

Resource Library for Teachers

Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir
by Peter Balakian
PEN Albrand Award Winner
Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
 
From Amazon.com:
The author of four volumes of verse, Peter Balakian writes with the precision of a poet and the lyricism of a privileged suburban child in 1950s New Jersey. He is shadowed by his relatives' carefully guarded memories of past trauma: the brutal Turkish extermination in 1915 of more than a million Armenians, including most of his maternal grandmother's family. Balakian seamlessly interweaves personal and historical material to depict one young man's reclamation of his heritage and to scathingly indict the political forces that conspired to sweep under the rug the 20th century's first genocide.

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Passage to Ararat
by Michael J. Arlen, Clark Blaise (Introduction)
National Book Award Winner, 1976
Grade Level: Ninth Grade to Adult

Passage to Ararat echoes current headlines as Arlen examines the 1915 "ethnic cleansing" [genocide] of the Armenian race by the Turks.  In Armenia, Arlen comes to understand his father's detachment from his past when he sees what it means when a people are "hated to death". A deeply felt, personal memoir with a new introduction by Clark Blaise.
 

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The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response
by Peter Balakian
Debuted #4 on New York Time's Best Sellers List
Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult

From Publishers Weekly: Now faded from memory in the shadow of the Holocaust, the Turkish slaughter of more than a million Armenians in 1915-1916 was a virtual template for the 20th-century horrors that followed, and much of what Balakian describes so powerfully is now chillingly familiar: inhuman brutality; mass deportations of helpless civilians (often in overcrowded railroad boxcars); headlines screaming of "systematic race extermination"; activists and intellectuals calling for intervention; and, most devastatingly, the lack of political will in the West to intervene to stop the slaughter. Balakian exposes the roots of the genocide in the "total war" atmosphere of WWI, which combusted with the pan-Turkish nationalism of the Young Turk government, inflamed Muslim rage against "infidel" Armenian Christians, and a long-simmering Ottoman hatred of the Armenians dating to Sultan Abdul Hamid II and his slaughters in the 1890s. Balakian, who wrote so movingly of the impact of the genocide on his own family in Black Dog of Fate, also underscores how well known the Armenian destruction was in America through detailed reports by U.S. consuls throughout Turkey and steady newspaper reporting, and how great the response was in providing humanitarian assistance to refugees and survivors. In a horrifying account, city by city, region by region, Balakian quotes firsthand testimony about the decimation of the Armenian population and their towns and culture. Yet he retains the measured tone of a historian throughout; if anything, he lets Woodrow Wilson off too easily for not declaring war on Turkey. But readers will come away sadly convinced that Armenians' brave but doomed stand in Van should be as celebrated as the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and the corpse-strewn Lake Gaeljak as well known as Babi Yar. 16 pages of b&w photos and maps not seen by PW.

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The Case of Soghomon Tehlirian
Armenian Political Trials
Translated by Vartkes Yeghiayan
Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
 
Soghomon Tehlirian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, assassinated Talaat Pasha in Berlin in 1921.  Talaat, Minister of the Interior and mastermind of the Genocide, had fled Turkey to seek refuge in Germany where he continued to labor for Pan-Turkism.  He had been tried in abstentia by the Turkish authorities and sentenced to death for the atrocities he planned and carried out, but no official effort had been made to apprehend him and bring him to justice.
 
After Talaat's assassination in Berlin, Soghomon Tehlirian, who admitted committing the murder, was given a jury trial.  During the two-day trial, expert witnesses and eye-witnesses testified not only about the murder itself, but about the details of the Armenian Genocide and Tehlirian's physical and mental condition as the only survivor in his family.  The jury acquitted Tehlirian of the crime.  He eventually moved to the United States and lived out his years in San Francisco.

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Ambassador Morgenthau's Story
by Henry Morgenthau, Peter Balakian (Editor) with a foreword by Robert Jay Lifton, an introduction by Roger W. Smith, and an epilogue by Henry Morgenthau III
Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
  
Originally published in 1918, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story is one of the most insightful and compelling accounts of what became a recurring horror during the 20th century: ethnic cleansing and genocide. While he served as the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire under Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1916, Henry Morgenthau witnessed the rise of a new nationalism in Turkey, one that declared "Turkey for the Turks." He grew alarmed as he received reports from missionaries and consuls in the interior of Turkey that described deportation and massacre of the Armenians. The ambassador beseeched the U.S. government to intervene, but it refrained, leaving Morgenthau without official leverage. His recourse was to appeal personally to the consciences of Ottoman rulers and their German allies; when that failed, he drew international media attention to the genocide and spearheaded private relief efforts.

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Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide
by Lorna Touryan Miller, Donald Eugene
Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
 
Between 1915 and 1923, over one million Armenians died, victims of a genocidal campaign that is still denied by the Turkish government. Thousands of other Armenians suffered torture, brutality, deportation-yet their story has received scant attention. Through interviews with a hundred elderly Armenians, Donald and Lorna Miller give the "forgotten genocide" the hearing it deserves. Survivors raises important issues about genocide and about how people cope with traumatic experience. Much here is wrenchingly painful, yet it also speaks to the strength of the human spirit.

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The Hunger
by Marsha Skrypuch
Grade Level: Seventh to Ninth Grade
 
Marsha's interest in untold chapters of ethnic history compelled her to write her newly completed young adult novel, The Hunger. The story tells of Paula, a contemporary teen who tries to solve her problems by dieting to perfection. Instead of attaining the perfect body, she ends up near death. While unconscious, her spirit slips back into her own great-grandmother's time and Paula finds herself disgorged onto the banks of the Euphrates River. Paula must deal with the stark contrast between her own self-imposed hunger and the chillingly real physical deprivation that her great-grandmother endured as a result of ethnic cleansing in Turkish Armenia.  This 40,000 word manuscript is the first in a proposed series of four novels, all dealing with real concerns of contemporary youth and parallel issues from the past.

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Nobody's Child
by Marsha Skrypuch
Grade Level: Seventh to Ninth Grade
 
Orphaned by the Adana massacre in 1909, Mariam and her siblings, together with their friend Kevork and his aunt, travel home to Marash hoping to find their remaining family still alive. Six years later, when the teens face deportation from Turkey, they are torn apart despite their best efforts to stay together. One thing sustains them throughout their horrifying ordeals -- the hope that they might one day be reunited.

A sequel to the highly successful The Hunger, Nobody's Child is a stirring and engaging story set during the Armenian Genocide, one of the twentieth century's most significant events.

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The Road From Home:
The Story of an Armenian Girl
by David Kherdian
Grade Level: Eighth to Tenth Grade

David Kherdian re-creates his mother's voice in telling the true story of a childhood interrupted by one of the most devastating holocausts of our century. Vernon Dumehjian Kherdian was born into a loving and prosperous family. Then, in the year 1915, the Turkish government began the systematic destruction of its Armenian population.

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The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917
by Leslie A. Davis
Edited, with an introduction and notes by Susan K. Blair
Grade Level: Adult
 
A searing indictment of the Ottoman Turkish government for its brutal massacre and deportation of its Armenian population in 1915-1923 by Leslie Davis who as U. S. consul in Harput from 1915 to 1917 was an eyewitness to the atrocities committed upon Armenians. Much of what he saw could scarcely be told in ways that would be palatable to western sensibilities, for as he wrote: " It is hard for one living in a civilized country to believe that such things are possible; yet, as Lord Bryce has said, `Things which we find scarcely credible excite little surprise in Turkey."' Nevertheless, his report survived to comprise "The Slaughterhouse Province".

Davis, who realized the need for a detailed record of the atrocities, had brought along a doctor with him in his forays who determined and described the causes of death of the victims. Davis photographed many of the victims and his pictures are included in the appendix. So damning was Davis' report that the editor who embarked on compiling the book in 1985 was threatened repeatedly by sources unknown to her and her family and eventually was forced to move to an undisclosed location for safety. On June 16, 1991 The Washington Post, in an article "An Author Living in Hiding" reported these threats in detail while examining the importance of Davis' report that was sent to the U.S. State Department in 1918, where it was classified and lay hidden for seven decades until it was published in 1991.

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United States Official Documents on the Armenian Genocide
(Archival Collections of the Armenian Genocide)
by Ara Sarafian (Editor/Compiler)
Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult

Volume I: The Lower Euphrates
Volume II: The Peripheries
Volume III: The Central Lands
Volume IV: Non-Consulor Reports
Volume V: Ambassador Morgenthau's Reports

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Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian
Genocide and the Holocaust
by Robert Melson
Grade Level: Adult
 
In a study that compares the major attempts at genocide in world history, Robert Melson creates a sophisticated framework that links genocide to revolution and war. He focuses on the plights of Jews after the fall of Imperial Germany and of Armenians after the fall of the Ottoman as well as attempted genocides in the Soviet Union and Cambodia. He argues that genocide often is the end result of a complex process that starts when revolutionaries smash an old regime and, in its wake, try to construct a society that is pure according to ideological standards.

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Vergeen: A Survivor of the Armenian Genocide
by Mae Derdarian
Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
 
This is the heart-rending, true story of a girl's indomitable will to survive the 20th century's first genocide. Through her recollections, the brutalities endured by two million Armenians during World War I come to life and are mirrored a generation later by Hitler's attack on the Jews. 
 
Destined for slaughter in the blistering Syrian desert, Vergeen and her widowed mother are deported from their home by the Ottoman Turks and forced into "death caravans" like all Armenians living in Turkey. Miraculously, during the long journey on mules and on foot, they withstand the barbaric atrocities until Vergeen is sold to an Arabic nomad. A bright and courageous teen-ager, Vergeen escapes after a year-long, intolerable existence as a Bedouin slave, eventually finding sanctuary and love in a German-Turkish railway camp. Years later, after the war, she comes to America where she is finally able to mend her young life.

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Zabelle
by Nancy Kricorian
Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult

From Library Journal:
Zabelle Chahasbanian, the seventysomething matriarch of an Armenian-American family, is dead. Her children gather to plan her funeral. What was special about Ma, they wonder. It is clear that at least they know nothing of the extraordinary life of this "ordinary" woman, her struggles and her dreams. They do not know much of the annihilation of her family in her homeland during her childhood or of her survival and emigration to the United States as the bride of a man she had only seen in a photograph. They know only the barest facts about her friendship with Arsinee, a spunky, irreverent woman who was Zabelle's lifelong mainstay. They know nothing of her poignant romance with a man named Moses. So what was special about Ma? Plenty. This first novel is a tender portrait of family, friendship, and love. Highly recommended. Kay Hogan, Univ. of Alabama Lib., Birmingham

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To the Desert: Pages from My Diary
by Vahram Dadrian
trans. Agop Hacikyan; ed. and intro. Ara Sarafian
Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult

Vahram Dadrian (1900–1948) started writing his diaries on 24 May 1915 because of the calamitous events facing Armenians on the horizon.

This was the period when Ottoman authorities began the vilification of Armenians, as a precursor to mass deportations and massacres. The Armenians of Chorum, where the Dadrians lived, fared no differently than other communities. They were deported to Aleppo, and then on to Jeresh (Jordan), where they remained until the end of World War I. Surviving members of the family returned to Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1919, where Vahram composed his diary-notes for publication.

Vahram's account, written in Armenian, was first published as a book in 1945. This is the first English translation of that work. It is a somewhat unusual narrative written by a child survivor of the Armenian Genocide. Vahram relates the fate of thousands of Armenians who were not sent to Der Zor in 1915, but to the wastelands south of Aleppo, as far as Maan and Es Salt in Jordan. Vahram relates his family's deportation, survival strategy—and luck—throughout this period. He also notes the condition of other deportees on the way.

Though the Dadrian family did not experience a general massacre like so many other Armenians, they still lost half of their members by 1919.

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Forgotten Fire
by Adam Bagdasarian
Grade Level: Ninth to Twelfth Grade

From Amazon.com:
Forced to watch his father escorted out of their lives by Turkish police, his brothers shot to death in their backyard, his grandmother murdered by a rock-wielding guard, and his sister take poison rather than be raped by soldiers, 12-year-old Vahan Kendarian abruptly begins to learn what his father meant when he used to say, "This is how steel is made. Steel is made strong by fire." Up until 1915, Vahan has lived a cosseted life as the son of a wealthy and respected Armenian man. But overnight his world is destroyed when the triumvirate of Turkish leaders, Enver Pasha, Talaat Bey, and Djemal Pasha, begins the systematic massacre of nearly three-quarters of the Armenian population of Turkey, 1.5 million men, women, and children. Soon Vahan is an orphan on the run, surviving by begging, pretending to be deaf and mute, dressing as a girl, hiding out in basements and outhouses, and even living for a time with the Horseshoer of Baskale, a Turkish governor known for nailing horseshoes to the feet of his Armenian victims. Time and again, the terrified and desperate boy grows close to someone--and loses him or her to an appalling, violent death. Through three years of unspeakable horror, Vahan is made stronger by this fire, and by perseverance, fate, or sheer luck, he survives long enough to escape to the safe haven of Constantinople.
 
Brutally vivid, Adam Bagdasarian's Forgotten Fire is based on the experiences of his great-uncle during the Armenian Holocaust. The absolutely relentless series of vile events is almost unbearable, but the quiet elegance of Bagdasarian's writing makes this a novel of truth and beauty. Parental guidance is strongly suggested for younger readers of this extraordinary, heartbreaking account. (Ages 14 and older) --Emilie Coulter

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Three Apples Fell From Heaven
by Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
 
From Publishers Weekly:
Reading this heartbreaking, beautiful, painful first novel is a bit like reliving an extraordinarily long dream. The leaps in time, the abundance of plot lines, the casual occurrence of unspeakable events and the persistent flashbacks all give the text a distinctly dreamlike quality. But the book is based in fact: it is set in Turkey between 1915 and 1917, when the government organized the systematic massacre of the Armenian population (Hitler was later to imitate some of the Turkish techniques). Marcom's form emphasizes the nature of her subject the many stories within stories, intertwined lives, murders and madness reflect the intricate interdependencies of a nation. A few of the many protagonists are Anaguil, an Armenian girl sheltering with a Muslim family, trying to hold on to her culture; Sargis, a student hiding from the Turkish police in his mother's attic, writing poetry as he loses his mind; Lucine, a servant at the American embassy, and the consul's mistress; Rachel, who has known all of them and who speaks after her death from the bottom of a well; Maritsa, a Muslim woman who wishes she were a boy these characters and others tell their stories in interconnected chapters. This is a novel in which chronology stretches and loops, the tale returning again and again to the central reality of brutality, cruelty and loss. The highly mannered style manifests a debt to the postmodern novel and the fairy tale, resulting in something between a cry and a reminiscence. This book is not for the faint of heart, but its readers will be well rewarded.

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The Armenian Genocide: News Accounts from
the American Press, 1915-1922
Richard D. Kloian, Editor
Grade Level: Ninth Grade to Adult

Heritage Publishing, 1985, 1992, 1996, 2005, 400 pages

Now also includes bonus material - news accounts from 1895 and 1909
:: Front Cover :: Back Cover ::

The Armenian massacres 1915-1916 were the single most riveting human rights issue in the United States in 1915-1917 that shocked the conscience of an entire nation and became the subject of national discussion, angst - and outrage. This compilation of 200 full length articles from The New York Times and over 60 full-length articles from 14 American journals of the time reprises the day to day reporting of the genocide. Included are photographs, maps, and official documents including the Turkish Military Tribunal of 1918 that found Turkey's former leaders guilty of ordering the Armenian massacres. Arranged in chronological order, the news articles are a historic chronicle of the genocide as reported daily by America's most prestigious newspaper.

This book reproduces those news accounts and calls attention to their importance as sources of first-hand evidence. The probative value of these accounts are supported by the subsequent disclosures that many of the stories reported by The Times were from official dispatches sent to the U.S. State Department in Washington by the American Ambassador and other American Consular officials in Turkey. Their statements, as well as the coincident testimony of teachers and missionaries, and the victims themselves, comprise an important pool of information and facts that aid in the teaching of this event as well as becoming a primary source of direct evidence.

For samples, go to the following pages:  U.S. News Accounts | Documents & Maps

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Encyclopedia of Genocide
Israel W. Charny, Editor
Grade Level: Reference
 
Rouben Paul Adalian, Steven L. Jacobs, Eric Markusen, and Samuel Totten, Associate Editors
 
Forewords by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Simon Wiesenthal
December 1999, 700 pages (2 vols)
 
This encyclopedia is the first reference work to document the full extent of the past and present of this awful subject with authority and objectivity, while also looking to the future and showing how education about the subject can perhaps lead to a world where genocide is better anticipated and prevented.
 
Detailed coverage is provided of many of the known and documented instances of genocide. The best-known instance of all, the Nazi Holocaust, is thoroughly dealt with and set within the context of other genocide such as that of the Armenians in the First World War, the killing in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the treatment of many indigenous peoples by colonizers in the New World, Australia and elsewhere, and the worst aspects of ‘ethnic cleansing' in the Former Yugoslavia.
 
Attention is paid to the perpetrators and victims of these genocides, the psychology and ideology underlying genocidal acts, the art, literature and film which have been produced in the course of or as the result of genocide, and the treatment of survivors.

Source: Institute for the Study of Academic Racism website,
www.ferris.edu/isar/arcade/genopedia/homepage.htm

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The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Paperback)
By Vahakn N. Dadrian
Grade Level: Adult

From The Armenian Reporter: "...Dadrians extensive research in European archives demonstrates persuasively that the anti-Armenian measures were not only genocidal in character but that they were premeditated. Finally, the reviewer commends Prof. Dadrian for choosing to examine and analyze the Armenian genocide in a historical perspective, calling the published volume an exceptional book."

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Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide
By Richard G. Hovannisian (Editor)
Grade Level: Adult

The decades separating our new century from the Armenian Genocide, the prototype of modern-day nation-killings, have fundamentally changed the political composition of the region. Virtually no Armenians remain on their historic territories in what is today eastern Turkey. The Armenian people have been scattered about the world. And a small independent republic has come to replace the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was all that was left of the homeland as the result of Turkish invasion and Bolshevik collusion in 1920. One element has remained constant. Notwithstanding the eloquent, compelling evidence housed in the United States National Archives and repositories around the world, successive Turkish governments have denied that the predecessor Young Turk regime committed genocide, and like the Nazis who followed their example - sought aggressively to deflect blame by accusing the victims themselves. This volume argues that the time has come for Turkey to reassess the propriety of its approach, and to begin the process that will allow it move into a post-genocide era.

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A Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (Paperback)
By Samuel Totten (Editor), William S. Parsons (Editor), Israel W. Charny (Editor)
Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult

…Through scholarly analyses and historical data, and eyewitness accounts, the contributors to this volume delineate the antecedents to and the causes and results of genocide in the twentieth century. In doing so, they provide compelling evidence that rebuts the convoluted and fallacious notions often created by cynics, deniers and "interpreters" who try to shape historical events to fit their own purposes.

The second edition contains new chapters on the genocide in the former Yugoslavia and the mass killing of the Kurds in Iraq, and the intervention and prevention of genocide, as well as updated information on the majority of the genocides.

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A Crime of Vengeance: An Armenian Struggle for Justice
By Edward Alexander
Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult

A Crime of Vengeance relates Turkey's massacre of Armenians in 1915 and the six-year hunt and assassination of former Grand Visier Talaat Pasha as revealed in an internationally-covered Berlin murder trial in 1921.

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Armenia: The Survival of a Nation
By Christopher Walker
Grade Level: Adult

Christopher Walker charts the history of the Armenians from the Armenian Genocide to the 1988 earthquake. Armenia: The Survival of a Nation was republished in 1990 and so does not include that Armenia is now an independent nation. The book is online and the chapters on the Armenian Genocide are a wonderful additional to a curriculum on the Armenian Genocide for upper level high school students. The biographical index is also extremely helpful for class projects about famous Armenians.

Click here for more information about this book.