ONLINE PHOTO EXHIBIT - GENOCIDE: CHILDREN AND MEMORY

 

''The Christian world – Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant – must persist in memorializing the Armenians and others who perished. And we must insist on recounting the brutality suffered by today’s Christians, in the Middle East and beyond, who also face expulsion and extermination. With God’s help, we will never forget. Nor will we be silent.''

Lela Gilberd 

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''With faith and courage, generations of Armenians have overcome great suffering and proudly preserved their culture, traditions, and religion and have told the story of the genocide to an often indifferent world.''

- Jerry Costello

April 25, 2015. Tsitsernakaberd Genocide Memorial.

"While the death toll in the trenches of Western Europe were close to 2 million by the summer of 1915, the extermination of innocent civilians in Turkey (the Armenians, but also Syrian and Assyrian Christians and large portions of the Greek population, especially the Greeks of Pontos, or Black Sea region) was reaching 1 million."

— Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris

Assyrian children light candles in the Assyrian Church in Arzni.

''In my opinion, what is happening in Iraq definitely can be called and qualified as a genocide, evidently, all the reasons are available.''

- Dr. Anahit Khosroeva

en.aravot.am/2014/08/12/166456/

April 25, 2015. Tsitsernakaberd Genocide Memorial.

"It is believed that in Turkey between 1913 and 1922, under the successive regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), more than 3.5 million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians were massacred in a state-organized and state-sponsored campaign of destruction and genocide, aiming at wiping out from the emerging Turkish Republic its native Christian populations. This Christian Holocaust is viewed as the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. To this day, the Turkish government ostensibly denies having committed this genocide."

— Prof. Israel Charney

April 25, 2015. Tsitsernakaberd Genocide Memorial.

"The story which I have told about the Armenians I could also tell with certain modifications about the Greeks and the Syrians."

— Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story

May 19, Tsitsernakaberd Genocide Memorial.

The anti-Greek and anti-Armenian persecutions are two phases of one — the extermination of the Christian element from Turkey.
- 31 July 1915: German priest J. Lepsius
 
April 24, 2014. Tsitsernakaberd Genocide Memorial.
 

''But at least it shows that the Armenians were not killed because they were Armenians, but because they were Christians.”

 

- Michael Hesemann, the German historian

www.catholicherald.co.uk/issues/april-17th-2015/the-christian-holocaust/

 
 
May 19, 2015. Tsitsernakaberd Genocide Memorial.
 

"In 1916, the Pontic Greeks along the Black Sea coast were again targeted. Six thousand Pontian men, women, and children of the Bafra area were burned alive as they took refuge in churches. In the town of Alajam another 2,500 Pontians were slaughtered. Of the 25,000 inhabitants of the Bafra region alone, 90 percent were eliminated by mass slayings or by sending them on long death marches where they were often raped and robbed and left to die of disease and starvation."

— Dr. Harry Psomiades, The Phantom Republic of Pontos and the Magali Catastrophe

 (The Hellenic Studies Forum Inc. of Australia, 1992)

The blessed joy of the Assyrian kid to become a Christian. The Assyrian Church in Arzni, Armenia.

The international community, unfortunately, looks in surprise and incomprehensible indifference at what is going on. It sees very well and keeps silent. When in the early 20th century, the Genocide of Armenians, also Assyrians, and Pontiac Greeks was taking place in the territory of Ottoman Empire by Young Turks, the international community was also silent. 

-Dr. Anahit Khosroeva

https://en.aravot.am/2014/08/12/166456/ 
 

May 19, 2015. Tsitsernakaberd Genocide Memorial.

The Ottoman Empire, under the cover of World War I, undertook a systematic and deliberate effort to eliminate its minority Christian populations. This genocidal campaign resulted in the death and deportation of well over 2,000,000 Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks.

May 19, 2007, WASHINGTON, DC — The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) j

 

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This is why memory is so important. Memory is the window through which we view history from those who have lived it. Perhaps we can say that memory is the soul of history, for the survivors of these historic events can also give us an insight into what they felt and dreamed and hoped for, and how they pieced together their shattered lives. Without their memory we might be completely at the mercy of the fabricators of our own history.

-Thea Halo, Soul of History

April 24, 2015. The Armenian Genocide Centennial. Tsitsernakaberd Genocide Memorial.
 

Yet to the Christians of the Middle East, for whom 1915 is not simply a historical record but a continuing nightmare, the Pope’s words will have been of great comfort. Recognition of the millions of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians who lost their lives in the 1915 genocide is not just a way of recording history but of offering hope for those suffering persecution today.

Lela Gilberd

www.hudson.org/research/11224-why-pope-francis-was-right-to-call-the-armenian-massacres-genocide-

Assyrian Genocide Remembrance Day, August 07, 2015. Assyrian Genocide Memorial, Yerevan.
 

We have to teach our kids KEEPING MEMORY...

- Dr. Marina Mkhitaryan