BY NIGOL BEZJIAN
They burned our homes, churches, hospitals and schools…
Words I have heard for most of my life from my grandparents, their friends, the survivors I had interviewed, read about them in history books, memoires and seen plenty of black and white photographs. I have heard many first hand accounts how people were killed and how they were orphaned, my grandparents among them. Stories of starvation, hunger, desperations and most of all miraculous tales of survival and revival were the stories in place of our children’s books, which we did not have to start with. But all that referred to a century ago, it related to my grandmothers and grandfathers who had lost their parents, homes, schools and everything else in historical Armenia and had started a new life in Aleppo out of Der El-Zor Syrian desert sands.
A century later a new war in Syria unfolded hurriedly from small uprisings to a civil war to an international conflict with no end in sight, 2011 and five years on and still counting, witnessing the demolition of our homes, hospitals, schools and cities in Syria this time. Our fellow countrymen who hosted my grandparents a century ago have themselves now become stateless, orphans, refugees and flotsam corpses washing up on the beaches stretched between Greece and Turkey on their way to sometimes welcoming and at times hostile countries, lives caught between barbwires and misleading open roads running into swiftly erected borders of a free Europe.
How ironic it was when on a recent trip to Toronto I, a grandson of Armenian refuges who found shelter and home in Syria, was humbled by helping a group of thirty Syrians emigrating to Canada after three years of living in hell of a tent camp in Jordan as refugees. When we finally landed in Toronto’s Airport, the most elderly thanked me countless times and wished to invite to his home but regrettably he did not know where his Canadian home would be. We parted after hugging each and every one of them and when shaking hands for the last time with the elderly he said “You are Armenian you understand us better than anyone else, we have become the you of our timesâ€
