Categories and Their Interstices: The Armenian Genocide Beyond Resistance and Accommodation

Abstract

During the Armenian Genocide, some deportees were afforded the opportunity to avoid subsequent waves of deportation and massacres by working for the Ottoman Turkish military (or civilian) authorities, who needed their skills and were willing to “pay” for it by sparing their lives. Having secured a job in the military’s hospitals and workshops thanks to their training, connections, and often bribes, these deportees often paid it forward, providing compatriots with food and medication, offering hideouts, facilitating their escape from concentration camps, and sometimes managing to procure jobs for them in the military. This chapter proposes referring to these actors as interstitials—those operating in the interstices of collaboration and resistance. The study of these actors offers insight into an underexplored phenomenon in Armenian genocide studies, long dominated by cookie-cutter categories. Serving the Ottoman war effort and assisting those whom the state targeted for annihilation, interstitials invite us to think about mass atrocity not only through less stringent categories—a recent trend in the scholarship—but outside of them. In this approach, we entertain the possibility that members of the targeted group can, at the same time, work to save their own skin and help other victims, collaborate with perpetrators and resist their genocidal policies.

Elmasd Santoorian managed to achieve a relatively privileged position during the Armenian Genocide. A nurse by training, she was deported from her home town of Marash, contracted typhus soon after finding shelter in Aleppo, and recovered from it with the help of an Armenian doctor, Khachig Boghossian, a deportee himself.¹ Her newly acquired immunity to typhus, her connection to Dr. Boghossian, and a smattering of good fortune helped her become the head nurse of an Ottoman military hospital in Aleppo’s Azizieh quarter as the genocide raged on. From this locus of fleeting but not insignificant safety and authority, Santoorian hired “Armenian refugee girls, some orphaned, but all hiding from the gendarmes,” helping save their lives. “I secured their work papers—which exempted them and their families from deportation and certain death,” she wrote decades later.²

Santoorian was among those Armenians afforded the opportunity to avoid subsequent waves of deportation and massacres by working for the Ottoman Turkish military. The authorities needed their skills and were willing to “pay” for it by sparing their lives. To be sure, these deportees—doctors, pharmacists, nurses, carpenters, seamstresses, and others whose skills and training the military deemed useful—constituted just a few thousand among more than half a million Armenian survivors from the initial rounds of violence who made it to Syria. But their numbers were large enough to make a difference not only for the Ottoman war effort, but also for the less fortunate deportees targeted for annihilation. Having secured a job in the military’s hospitals and workshops thanks to their training, connections, and often bribes, these professionals often paid it forward, providing compatriots with food and medication, offering hideouts, facilitating their escape from concentration camps, and sometimes managing to procure jobs for them in the military.

I propose referring to these actors as interstitials—those operating in the interstices of collaboration and resistance. The study of these actors offers insight into an underexplored phenomenon in Armenian genocide studies, long dominated by cookie-cutter categories. Serving the Ottoman war effort and assisting those whom the state targeted for annihilation, interstitials invite us to think about mass atrocity not only through less stringent categories—a recent trend in the scholarship—but outside of them. In this approach, we entertain the possibility that members of the targeted group can, at the same time, work to save their own skin and help other victims, collaborate with perpetrators and resist their genocidal policies.

In this chapter, I explore accommodation and resistance during the Armenian Genocide, focusing on the experiences of a variety of actors—adults and children—deported to Ottoman Syria. I then examine the actions of Armenian doctors, pharmacists, and nurses who operated in the interstices of collaboration and resistance, arguing that those operating in this “grey zone” often stood a better chance of saving their own lives, and helping rescue many others caught in the maelstrom of deportation and massacres.

Collaborators

Standing at the crossroads of resistance and collaboration may not have been the safest choice. Yet, many Armenians perceived efforts to distance themselves from those targeted for destruction, even profiteer from them, and collude with the perpetrator community as the more prudent (and lucrative) of choices. Pharmacist Jivan Kaltakjian, a deportee from Kayseri, is a case in point. In the fall of 1915, when deportees camped near Bab were no longer allowed to visit the city to purchase goods or receive mail, Kaltakjian used his connections with Ottoman officials to exploit deportees and accumulate wealth. He would secure written authorization from deportees to go to the post office on their behalf and claim the money family members had sent them only to betray them by splitting the funds with the police and camp guards. Meanwhile, the victims of his schemes would be redeported to another camp.³

Kaltakjian’s conduct was hardly an exception. Ottoman authorities had rendered swaths of Syrian territory as breeding grounds for bribery, extortion, and profiteering from Armenian deportees. And although the main beneficiaries were the state’s functionaries, the latter often relied on the collusion of deportees. Armenian colluders exposed hideouts to the police, extorted exorbitant bribes from their compatriots, and stole humanitarian aid allocated to them. In a notebook chronicler Aram Andonian compiled after the war, names of Armenian collaborators appeared alongside those of Turkish, Kurdish, Chechen, Circassian, and Arab perpetrators. These included Hayg Boyajian and Hrant Mamigonian, both from Aleppo, who worked for the authorities as agents and denouncers; Garabed Momjian who abused his position and stole deportee aid; and Rev. Artin Khachadurian, a relief committee member throughout the war who, according to Andonian, enriched himself by stealing deportee relief money.⁴

Exploitation and profiteering were even more widespread in concentration camps. Armenian bekcis (guards), serving as enforcers for camp officials, demanded bribes and engaged in wanton violence against fellow deportees. Some were auxiliaries in trafficking, rape, and even murder. Artin Çavuş Nordigian (from Adana), the head of the guards in the Dipsi camp, took bribes to allow deportees in transit to stay overnight at the camp before marching onward.⁵ Mgrdich Bozouklian (from Nevşehir), the head of the guards in the Karlık transit site outside of Aleppo, served as a brutal enforcer for camp officials and military officers. When an Ottoman officer by the name of Aziz Bey fancied a twelve-year-old Armenian girl, Bozouklian abducted her for him. The officer enslaved her until he was dispatched to Damascus a year later and had to let her go. According to Andonian, Bozouklian helped deportation functionaries at Karlık violate several other girls and women. When the Allies entered Aleppo, he escaped to Aintab, where his family had lived during the war.

Nonetheless, collusion did not guarantee survival. Kaltakjian enriched himself at the Bab camp and then left in late spring 1916 for Der Zor, where he hoped to live comfortably under the patronage of Zeki Bey, the newly appointed district governor whom he considered a friend. However, bandits killed him on the city outskirts. Andonian recalled that the deportees in the Meskeneh concentration camp cheered upon hearing the news of his death. Survivor Hovhannes Khacherian offered a more restrained sendoff: “As if for the multiple evils he committed, [Jivan] eventually became one of the victims of the massacre. Yet neither I, nor many others will shed a tear for him.”⁶

Khacherian’s words imply some supernatural retribution for Kaltakjian’s crimes. In the case of many other collaborators, the deportees they victimized reached them before karma did. Most Armenian camps guards lost their authority when they were redeported to other camps and were rendered helpless against acts of retribution from other inmates. Similarly, informants in cities such as Aleppo and Istanbul were hunted down in the aftermath of the war by Armenian avengers. One of the first assignments of Soghomon Tehlirian, who assassinated Talat Pasha in Berlin in 1921, had been to kill an Armenian informant a year earlier.⁷

Children collaborated too. Administrators of a state orphanage in Antoura where Armenian children were Turkified (they were converted to Islam, circumcised, given Muslim names, and forced to speak only Turkish) adopted control tactics similar to those in the concentration camps. Karnig Panian, a survivor of the orphanage, explains how “a few of the older Armenian boys … became the overseers in the classrooms. They carried whips to help keep order both inside the classrooms and outside in the courtyard. They had names like Küçük Enver, Küçük Talaat, Küçük Jemal, Küçük Hasan.”⁸ [Küçük means little or junior in Turkish, while the names are those of Young Turk leaders. K.M.] The boys who collaborated with the school administrators enjoyed some benefits until the Ottoman defeat and withdrawal from Syria, at which point the overseers “cast off their wolf’s clothing; they became sheep again. Now Little Talaat, Little Enver, and Little Jemal again called themselves Toros, Mgrdich, and Dikran, and they played with the rest of the boys as if nothing unpleasant had ever happened.”

But not everyone was accepted into the fold. “One boy from Marash, who had become completely Turkified, did his best to atone for his sins by relearning Armenian and constantly insulting the Turkish language and the old Turkish staff.” Some of the children at the orphanage clearly thought his efforts were too little, too late. “One morning, his body was found right outside the walls, beaten beyond recognition. Nobody ever knew what had happened to him or who had killed him. He was buried in the cemetery and left to the jackals.”⁹

Resisters

Those who selflessly toiled to save deportees did not flinch at the risk of exile, arrest, and death. Armenians engaged in resistance as soon as the Committee of Union and Progress enacted the empire-wide arrests, deportations, and massacres in the spring of 1915. In the aftermath of the April 24 arrests, Shavarsh Misakian, an Armenian leader and intellectual in Istanbul who had escaped arrest, organized a clandestine chain of communication between the Ottoman provinces, Istanbul, and the outside world, smuggling reports of atrocities out of the country.¹⁰

Others organized groups for self-help efforts. They procured, transferred, and distributed funds, food, and medication to exiles, saved them from sexual slavery, created safe houses and underground orphanages, and upheld deportee morale as hundreds of communities were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and marched in the direction of Syria. In The Resistance Network, I explore the role of an indigenous, organized, and sustained effort to help deportees, led by Aleppo’s Armenian community. These groups were loosely interlinked, operating out of cities where the population was only partly deported (Istanbul and Aleppo), and along railroad lines stretching from Istanbul to Konya, Aleppo, Ras ul-Ain, and Mosul.

Gulenia Danielian’s words about her husband, Rev. Hovhannes Eskijian, capture the efforts of these resisters in general: “Barely out of bed from his sickness, disregarding the personal hardships and peril to his own life, relentlessly labored day and night to save other lives.”¹¹ Until his death in March 1916, Rev. Eskijian provided food, shelter, and medication to Armenian deportees arriving in Aleppo. As the pastor’s health was failing, the Ottoman Turkish authorities were tracking his movements. The disease got to him first. He died at thirty-four from typhoid contracted from the deportees he served. Rev. Eskijian was one among hundreds of Armenians in Ottoman Syria who chose—and this was a conscious, deliberate choice with full appreciation of the risks—the path of direct confrontation with the Ottoman Turkish authorities. The efforts of nearly all the central actors in the clandestine humanitarian network radiating from Aleppo were interrupted by exile, imprisonment, or murder.

The resistance network also relied on children’s assistance. Here’s how John Minassian, a teenage deportee from Sivas, describes his role:

I became a messenger from the railroad station back to the Reverend’s [reference to Rev. Eskijian, K.M.] house, a dangerous job. I took the sick to the physician and, worse yet, visited daily almost all the underground hideouts in Aleppo. College professors, ministers, and young graduates in hiding were all subject to arrest. The Reverend would give me money to hand out to these people, and they, in return, would ask me to buy food for them, or a little charcoal to warm their cold, dark rooms. They were in constant fear that the government’s arm would reach them and re-deport them.¹²

Away from urban centers, in the Meskeneh concentration camp, a number of women who witnessed the destitute condition of children set up an orphanage on March 11, 1916. Three women from Nigde assumed responsibility for the care of orphans, with support from a priest, Yetvart Tarpinian, who had arrived in Meskeneh only a week earlier.¹³ As word spread, more and more orphans came to the tent. What started as a shelter for a few soon provided refuge to one hundred children. The women frantically tried to secure supplies for their charges: they pleaded with camp officials, asked deportees for donations and tried to solicit outside help. They were not always successful. One of the women, Rakel Kirazian, was beaten up on several occasions by the anbâr memuru (warehouse official) Ali Riza for repeatedly requesting food for the starving children. Some deportees at the camp gave from the little they had. Those who got married at the camp—and there were indeed dozens who did so, either despite or because of the destitute conditions at the camp and the uncertain future—made donations to the orphanage to celebrate the occasion.¹⁴ The most significant assistance came from two Evangelical Armenian women who were referred to as “members of the ruhci sect.” They offered to provide bread to the orphans regularly and did so, with funds from a German woman missionary based in Aleppo.¹⁵ After a confrontation with camp director Hüseyin, two of the women and many of the orphans in the tent were deported to Der Zor, where most of them perished.¹⁶

Although Minassian survived the genocide, most resisters, including Rev. Eskijian and Kirazian did not. Pushing themselves “to the very limit of [their] endurance,” these resisters saved the lives of many, but their actions cost them their freedom and, often, their lives.

Interstitials

Commenting on the stringent categories that dominate the study of mass atrocities, philosopher John K. Roth writes, “A three-term taxonomy—perpetrator, victim, bystander—has long dominated studies of the Holocaust, genocide, and other mass atrocities. In such contexts, those terms are not separable, static, or purely descriptive. The intentions and actions of perpetrators entail victims, and victims do not exist without perpetrators. The power of perpetrators and the vulnerability of victims also depend on bystanders. Importantly, a person is not by nature—born or preordained—to be one or the other. A person becomes a perpetrator, a victim, or a bystander.”¹⁷

In a similar vein, members of targeted groups—the victims in the above taxonomy—are often either stripped of agency and lumped into one amorphous category, or identified as resisters or collaborators. And while Holocaust historiography boasts a decades-long tradition of striving for a nuanced treatment of these categories, the study of other cases of genocide—most certainly the Armenian one—lag far behind. Yet, as mentioned earlier in this essay, the Armenian case illustrates—arguably more so than the Holocaust—the limitations of stringent categories and the importance of thinking of the actors operating outside of them: in the interstices of collaboration and resistance. After all, the proportion of Armenian deportees who were afforded the opportunity to inhabit this space was much higher compared to the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Not only did thousands of Armenians in cities and towns in Ottoman Syria alone survive in part due to jobs they had secured with the Ottoman military, many thousands of others escaped massacres because of their connections to these employees.

It is important to emphasize that only a fraction of Armenian doctors, nurses, and others with skills deemed useful to the military survived the genocide. Most others perished in the initial rounds of deportations and violence, or the subsequent internment and massacres in Ottoman Syria. And the thousands who managed to secure jobs often did as a result of enormous toil, connections, bribes, and certainly happenstance. Hagop Arsenian notes in his memoirs that many of his fellow pharmacist deportees, for instance, secured documentation as military pharmacists upon arrival in Ottoman Syria, thus evading further deportation and death.¹⁸ In Bab, Arsenian “appealed to the military governor and testified to my being a certified pharmacist and requested that I be taken into military service as they had done with others.” The attempt failed. “In an extremely ironic and mercilessly rude tone, he advised me to go to Der Zor and apply there.”¹⁹ Deported from one camp to the other along the Euphrates, Arsenian arrived in Abuharar, where he “started giving medicine and treating gendarmes for free and they in return allowed me to stay there. We thus succeeded in staying for a while longer as doctor and pharmacist.²⁰ Finally, in July 1915, just a month before the Der Zor massacres that claimed the lives of 200,000 Armenians in the region, Arsenian secured the coveted position of military pharmacist that saved his life and that of his family. He writes:

Eventually, I was accepted to the position of military pharmacist and permission was granted to me to travel to Jerusalem in my newly assigned duty there. I was eternally grateful to the old military physician Kaimakam Baghdasar Bey [an Armenian doctor, K.M.], who did not spare any means or effort to find me a position.²¹

We can think of interstitials during the Armenian Genocide such as Arsenian as actors operating in a space not drastically different from what Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi refers to as the “gray zone.”²² Another helpful formulation comes from Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer, who distinguishes between “selfish” acts and “self-ish” ones. He writes:

The selfish act ignores the needs of others through choice when the agent is in a position to help without injuring one’s self in any appreciable way. Selfishness is motivated by greed, indifference, malice, and many other value-laden categories. The former victim who describes self-ish acts is vividly aware of the needs of others but because of the nature of the situation is unable to choose freely the generous impulse that a compassionate nature yearns to express.²³

Interstitials during the Armenian Genocide may indeed have operated in a “gray zone” of sorts and often opted for “self-ish” acts (like the kapos in concentration camps during the Holocaust), yet there is a nuance that cannot be overstated: Armenian actors serving as doctors, nurses and pharmacists in the Ottoman army or laboring in military uniform factories were not direct participants in the mechanics of destruction. And while it can be argued that any labor in support of the Turkish military effort, minuscule as it may have been, helped prolong the war and, hence, the genocide, the distinction remains an important one. Moreover, Armenian interstitials often engaged in acts of mutual help and even resistance—helping save fellow Armenian deportees and thus acting against the will and sanction of the authorities.

Take, for instance, the case of Arika Amiralian, who ran a uniform production factory for the Turkish military. Survivor Loossin Chorbajian Najarian remembered how he and his parents secured employment in 1917.

In Aleppo, my father found a job in a Turkish military workshop called “Imaret Khaneh,” the director of which was an Armenian lady from Marash, Mrs. Arika Amiralian. Military uniforms were made there. Shortly thereafter, my mother too started working there and soon was made a supervisor. The Arabs used to call her “moodira” (directoress). I was now old enough myself to work and so I became a salaried employee of the same place.²⁴

Survivor Yeranuhi Simonian too worked in one such factory, if not the same one directed by Amiralian, until the end of the war.²⁵ So did Payladzou Captanian, who signed up to avoid redeportation as soon as she heard about the workshops. A red and white piece of cloth with the inscription “women of the Third Army” was sewn onto their outfits, allowing them to walk freely in the city. “The government gave three pieces of bread to each of us on a daily basis, in return for our labor. Rich and poor, all came to work here, only to avoid exile,” she remembered.²⁶ Walter Rossler, the German Consul in Aleppo, reported in November 1916 that “each of the indigenous church administrations has taken over such workhouses, so that in total about 4,000 women have temporarily been saved in this manner.”²⁷ Survivor Yervant Odian recalled that by March 1918, more than five thousand deportees labored in these workshops.²⁸

Some interstitials engaged in more dangerous acts of defiance and resistance than others, often paying dearly for it. Dr. Hovhannes Magarian (deportee from Elbistan), benefitting from the opportunity to work for the district governor of Der Zor, secured a special permit that anchored him in the city. He was soon appointed health inspector general for deportees in the region and helped with the procurement of bread to some deportees. “The respected doctor had created an immediate wellbeing among the general deportee population, taking particular care of women exiled from Armenia.” Witnessing the horrors of the genocide, Magarian suffered a nervous breakdown and, within two months, “died in severe seizures, and did not even have someone to carry his coffin,” recounted survivor Mihran Aghazarian.²⁹

Conclusion

“Multidimensional investigation of the Armenian Genocide has now begun,” declared Richard G. Hovannisian in the introduction to an edited volume four decades ago.³⁰ Following the pioneering work of Vahakn N. Dadrian, a handful of scholars—chief among them Taner Akçam and Raymond Kévorkian—have produced a robust literature on the precipitating factors and mechanics of the genocide, laying the foundations for a truly multidimensional investigation by a generation of scholars working on regional and local dynamics as well as explorations of gender, resistance, and humanitarianism. My own research on the genocide in Ottoman Syria and Armenian agency is one of many anchored in this framework.

In this essay, I build on my earlier work documenting the range of responses of Armenian deportees caught in the maelstrom of the Armenian Genocide to explore the experiences of deportee actors who operated in the interstices of resistance and collaboration. Serving the Ottoman military through various jobs and assisting fellow Armenians caught in the genocide, interstitials not only challenge stringent taxonomies such as “collaborator” or “resister,” but also invite us to think about the spaces in the interstices of such categories. Thousands of deportees during the Armenian genocide tried, at the same time, to save their own skin and engage in mutual help. Many collaborated with perpetrators, while waiting out the war and resisting their policies.

Ironically, for many of these interstitials, Ottoman Turkish withdrawal from Syria in October 1918 meant the loss of both their oppressors and their rations. And while their actions may not have been as selfless and relentless as the efforts of resisters, they too played a part in salvaging a fraction of the nation.