The Garden of the Righteous

The audience of Aram I, Catholicos of Cilicia of the Armenians with Pope Benedict XVI on November 24, recalled the memory of the Armenian genocide (1915-1916), one of the greatest tragedies in Europe with that of the Jews by Hitler, of the gulag under Lenin’s and Stalin’s rule, of the great famine (holodomor) in Ukraine under the Soviet regime (1932-1933), up to the more recent ethnic strife in the Balkans (1990-1999). According to historians’ estimates, two thirds of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire have perished, some 1,500,000 people. Many children were converted to Islam while women were sent to harems. The 1915 deportations and extermination were preceded by pogroms; in 1894-96 and in 1909. In Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, April 24 is the day of the remembrance of the beginning the Metz Yeghérn (the “Great Evil”, the genocide), celebrated with a procession in Dzidzernagapert, the “Hill of the swallows” where the mausoleum for the victims of the extermination was erected. Since 1996 the ashes and the tombstones of the Righteous who helped the victims, endeavoured to stop the massacres or communicated the ongoing genocide to the world at their own risk – before, during, and after the genocide – are interred beneath the Memory Wall. SIR Europe collected the testimony of Pietro Kuciukian, physician, writer and founder of the International Committee of the Righteous for Armenians and promoter of the Garden of the Righteous. The force of memory. “The Garden of the Righteous was conceived in 1995, when I went to Armenia with Mischa, the son of Armin Wegner, the German officer – Germany was Turkey’s alley and an accomplice in the genocide – who took the most significant pictures of the genocide of the Armenian people in 1915. During that trip”, he recalled, “we carried with us the ashes of his father to be interred. Armin Wegner was a righteous; he had been an unwilling witness of the deportation and massacre of the Armenians. But in spite of injunctions and prohibitions, and risking capital punishment, he took pictures of the deportation camps, collected the letters of plea of the condemned and tried to consign them to the embassies. He put into writing the horrors that he had witnessed. Once he returned to Germany, he tried in vain to inform the rest of the world on the tragedy of the Armenian people. The genocide remained unpunished while another one was being planned. The signs were there to be seen. Wegner sent a letter to Hitler imploring him not to subject the Jews to the same tragedy suffered by the Armenians. His pleas led to his imprisonment, to tortures and finally to his exile. Today Armin Wegner’s testimony is remembered with a tree planted in the Yad Vashem memorial and a road with a tombstone bearing his name in Yerevan in Armenia.An embrace of reconciliation. During the ceremony for the interring of the ashes of Armin Wegner in the “Wall of Memory” in Yerevan, Mischa was surrounded by a crowd. ‘The Armenian people – he was told – will never forget your father nor all those who have helped retrace his past”. Before the embrace of a German and an Armenian – Kuciukian recalls – I clearly saw that the memory of the righteous and of the testimonies regarded the identity of the survivors, and mostly, the possibility of reconciliation between peoples. I bore in mind that indeed my father’s family, in Constantinople, was saved by a Turk. From that moment onwards I continued bringing other Righteous who had saved the life of Armenians to public attention. These include Anatole France, French scholar and Nobel-prize winner, Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, Nobel prize for peace and first Refugees’ Commissioner of the League of Nations, Henry Morgenthau, U.S. Ambassador in Constantinople, the German pastor Johannes Lepsius, founder of orphanages in Armenia and many others…”.The forest of the Righteous. “ We have extended this experience of the Garden of the Righteous to all other genocides (Rwanda) and founded the organization “The Forest of the Righteous” (gariwo.net). In a number of symbolic sites, such as Yerevan in Armenia, Sarajevo in Bosnia Herzegovina, in Milan and recently also in Padua (Italy), the example of the first Garden of the Righteous in Jerusalem, at the Yad Vashem memorial, is being put into practice to pay homage to non-Jews who risked their lives to combat the Shoah. In Yerevan there is a tombstone and a tree for John Paul II”. An important lesson. “The Armenian genocide, and not only this genocide, has a lot to say and to teach to Europe”, he declared. “If one day Turkey recognised the genocide, a leap forward in the Country’s democratization process would be made. Despite the fact that the worst genocides were committed in Europe, the Old Continent has made great progress in the establishment of democracy. I believe that genocides such as this will never happen again. I am also in favour of Turkey’s adhesion to the EU. I speak as an Armenian. For us this will entail bordering with Europe. And Armenia views itself in Europe”.