A Family Tree Uprooted by a 60-Year-Old Secret

[Adsos Letter]

Source: New York Times
By DAN BILEFSKY
Published: January 5, 2010


ISTANBUL — Fethiye Cetin recalled the day her identity shattered.

She was a young law student when her beloved grandmother Seher took her aside and told her a secret she had hidden for 60 years: that she, the grandmother, was born a Christian Armenian and had been saved from a death march by a Turkish officer, who snatched her from her mother’s arms in 1915 and raised her as Turkish and Muslim.

Her grandmother revealed to her that her real name was Heranus and that her biological parents had escaped to New York. Heranus, Ms. Cetin learned, was just one of thousands of Armenian children who were kidnapped and adopted by Turkish families during the genocide of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1918. These survivors were sometimes called “the leftovers of the sword.”

“I was in a state of shock for a long time — I suddenly saw the world through different eyes,” said Ms. Cetin, now 60. “I had grown up thinking of myself as a Turkish Muslim, not an Armenian. There had been nothing in the history books about the massacre of a people which had been erased from Turkey’s collective memory. Like my grandmother, many had buried their identity — and the horrors they had seen — deep inside of them.”

Now, however, Ms. Cetin, a prominent member of the estimated 50,000-strong Armenian-Turkish community here and one of the country’s leading human rights lawyers, believes a seminal moment has arrived in which Turkey and Armenia can finally confront the ghosts of history and possibly even overcome one of the world’s most enduring and bitter rivalries.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/world/europe/06iht-turkey.html?hp&ex=&ei=&partner=

[Behind the Aegis]

1. That must have been like having a bucket of ice water thrown on you!

A very interesting story.

[niyad]

2. k and r for an amazing story.

[MinneapolisMatt]

3. K&R

.

[The Backlash Cometh]

4. Is this the horror that Hasteret was paid by Turkey to keep mum?

[madokie]

5. Why can't people just live in peace?

because some people want it all and will stop at nothing to get it all and they seem to gravitate to the top of the gene pool. so sad that we have to war.

[invictus]

6. K&R

[Gregorian]

7. My grandmother narrowly escaped abduction by a Turkish man.

I know very little. Just days ago my father was finally able to get enough information to put a geneology together that went partially as far back as my great grandfather. I only knew my grandmother.
She was selling her own household goods just to earn enough to keep from starving. A man entered her store several times over a period of time. She knew what he was up to. She managed to sell everything in the store and close up and leave for America before anything worse happened. I lost relatives who never made it here.

[alfredo]

11. We haven't been able to trace our family back to Armenia, but

have evidence of our family in Prussia in the 1600's. It is a region of Europe that had healthy population of Armenians. Our name does pop up in Istambul.

[Gregorian]

14. Genocide and war reverberate down through generations

Crimes committed don't just stop at the scene of the crime.

I suffered immensely for what the Turks did. I don't hold a grudge. I just wish we could deal with people in a way that would avoid and prevent this stuff. Letting Bush and his gang off is like letting it happen again.

On my mother's side the same family with the same name still owns the house they build in 1649 in Rhode Island. Talk about stability. Life was meant to be enjoyable. We shouldn't have to be searching for meaning.

[alfredo]

15. If you have to search for meaning, your life is meaningless.

[Gregorian]

16. I guess that's why most of this doesn't really matter to me.

And why I don't have a grudge against those who did it.

But it would be nice to have less disruption. I guess. Maybe life IS disruption. Haha.

[alfredo]

17. As they say, don't sweat the small shit. It happened early last century.

It's done. It's up to the Turkish people to look backwards because in the end, we lost lives, they lost face.

[Solly Mack]

8. k/r

[NancyG]

9. kick nt

[dkf]

10. I know nothing about this.

Damn.

[Fumesucker]

12. Lots of families have dark secrets..

Far more than most of us would believe really..

I didn't find out my own family's secret until I was over fifty years old and my parents dead for over thirty years.

[shanti]

13. thank you for posting this story

i'm forwarding it to my armenian DIL.