In José Saramago’s novel "Death with Interruptions", death suddenly disappears. No one in the country dies. At first, everyone thinks it is a miracle, but soon they realize that death has not vanished; it has merely been pushed beyond the border. People begin transporting their dying relatives to other countries. The problem has not been solved, only moved out of sight.
States sometimes have exactly this kind of relationship with memory. When they cannot eliminate the truth, they push it beyond the borders of curricula, public memory, and everyday conversations, quite literally beyond a geographical frontier. Yet just like death eventually returns to the country in Saramago’s novel, truth sent into exile inevitably returns as well. Sometimes in a grandmother’s story, sometimes in a taxi driver’s question, sometimes in a friend’s anger. Or one day, in a question asked by your seven-year-old son.
One day, my son, who was in first grade, came home from school.
“Mom, we were born in Turkey, right?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Both you and me?”
“Yes.”
He was silent for a while.
Then he asked:
“Mom, Turkey is our enemy, isn’t it?”
For a few seconds, I could not answer.
“Who says that?” was all I could manage.
“Everyone,” he said. “My classmates, the older kids, their grandmothers and grandfathers... everyone.”
I tried to explain that countries can have problems and disagreements with one another, but people do not have to be enemies. He listened but did not say a word.
Time passed.
After returning from a trip to Istanbul, I asked him when he came home from school:
“Did you tell your friends about your vacation in Istanbul?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged.
“Just because.”
Peace, right now!
The burden on his shoulders became a burden in my heart. Because I could not say anything to him, I desperately shared this moment on my social media account. And at the end, like an incurable romantic, I added: “Peace, right now!”
Most of my friends agreed with me, but one friend, who also had a son of a similar age, responded:
“You may have been born in Turkey. You may not see them as enemies. But I will always tell my son who his enemy is.”
I could not be angry at this sentence. Because in this geography, people do not speak to teach hatred to their children; they speak to pass on the pain they themselves have lived through and to protect them from invisible dangers. It is, in other words, an effort to survive, rooted in deep trauma.
As I write these words, some of you may be thinking, “See? Armenians are raising their children to see us as enemies.” I attended an Armenian school in Istanbul. I learned Turkish history from official history textbooks. In those books, Armenians were described as people who betrayed the state and collaborated with the Russians. The deportation decision had been made for “security” reasons. You know the story: as circumstances changed, small “improvements” were made to the narrative. It was said that deaths occurred “naturally” along the way due to hunger or exhaustion; from time to time, “mutual suffering” was also mentioned. In fact, Armenians continued to be coded as a security problem for Turkey throughout the Republican period. I am talking about the few Armenians who remained, whose numbers steadily dwindled. But that is not our subject. Our subject is how memory is transmitted to children.
Just as the Armenia–Turkey normalization process and the opening of borders are being discussed; as mutual visits between peoples have become more frequent, and Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan has softened his language in his April 24 speeches and taken risky steps that touch the raw nerves of society, such as removing the silhouette of Ararat from passport stamps; some of you may ask, “Why are you bringing up 1915 now?” Because the fact that official recognition of the genocide has been removed from the table as a prerequisite for starting relations is a tremendous opportunity. Now we can discuss the genocide not as a matter of political bargaining, but as an issue of humanity.
How did you survive?
As an Armenian from Turkey living in Yerevan, I experience a similar dialogue almost every time I get into a taxi.
“Where are you from?” they ask.
“I am an Armenian from Istanbul,” I say.
Then comes the inevitable second question:
“But you are Armenian, right?”
“Yes.”
Then, sometimes hesitantly, sometimes directly, they ask:
“So, how did you survive?”
Behind this question, there is always something else hidden:
“How did your family escape?”
Sometimes there is an even heavier implication:
“Did they survive because they were collaborators?”
Yet no genocide is total. Some people fled to the mountains, some survived by chance, and some were hidden by their neighbors. Perhaps we can begin the conversation precisely with these “good people.” No one should fear that these stories will overshadow the magnitude of the suffering that took place; the existence of good people does not make evil insignificant. On the contrary, it makes it even more visible. If there were people who hid others, then there were also people who had to hide. If some people saved lives, then there was organized persecution threatening those lives.
Without leaving hatred as an inheritance
States can sometimes behave like those people in Saramago’s novel who were helpless in the face of death. As in the novel, painful memories may be pushed out of the public sphere, and memory may be sterilized by state power. But covering up the truth does not make it disappear; it merely leaves the problem as a festering secret in the laps of future generations.
The question is very simple:
How many more generations are we willing to watch crushed under this heavy burden?
By the way, those who think that our primary motivation in asking Turkey to confront its past is only land or compensation are deeply mistaken. Of course, there are different opinions on these issues. There will always be small groups among Armenians who demand territory; there will also be broader segments that advocate compensation. These are matters that belong to the realms of law, politics, and international relations.
But beneath all these debates lies a deeper question: How will justice be achieved?
Because justice is not only about court decisions or documents signed between states. It is also about creating a sense, within society’s conscience, that what happened has been seen, heard, and taken seriously. And the path to that lies in being able to talk about it.
Perhaps one of the next steps should be for educators, historians, and people who work on memory from both countries to come together and discuss these difficult questions. There must be a way to tell the truth without denying it and without passing hatred on as an inheritance. Because sometimes the very act of being able to talk is more valuable than the outcome itself. Peace is not built only at border crossings; it begins in the lines of a textbook, inside a classroom, in a sentence spoken by a child. I want my child to spend his energy building the future, not defending or explaining the past. An honorable and lasting peace is the most natural right of the children of these two countries; for us, it is a debt long overdue. If a seven-year-old child is hesitant to tell his friends the country where he was born, then peace is still not an agreement to be signed by politicians, it is a problem that must be resolved in the lives of children.
