Survivors: An Oral History Of The Armenian Genocide

"Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide", Donald & Lorna Miller, UC Press, CA, 1999, ISBN-13 978-0-520-212956-4, pbk 192 pgs., plus 3 Appendices 15 pgs., Notes 24 pgs., Biblio 5 pgs., Index 4 pgs., Map & 15 pgs. of B/W photos, 9" x 6"Authored by Donald Miller, USC Prof. of Relig. & wife Lorna Miller whose parents survived the Armenian Genocide (AG) providing Armenian translation from personally conducted audio-taped interrogations with 103 (62f/41m) Armenians born in Turkey. Interviewees largely garnered from Southern California. Using "Interview Guide" as format allowed representative sampling & synthesis of queries for proper balance of content & a check for internal consistency.Book is in 3 Parts: - I: Historical Background, II: Survivor Accounts, and III: Analysis. - but also Appendices on Methodology, Interview Guide, & Survivors Interviewed. A large portion of the material is similar in detail, very often many precise quotations, etc. of same material given in most contemporary books on AG, thusly, names, dates, places & events are validated & often same reference sources utilized extensively.However, unlike most treatises on AG, this oral history provides a much keener, even intimate depiction of life in Anatolia before & after the massacres & genocide that details ghoulish atrocious barbaric acts of torture, killings, rape; of family dissolutions; of adopting survival techniqes occasionally working to thwart being murdered or quash a suicide. There are sundry, detailed references to acts of kindness shown by a few Turks, rarely a Kurd; but much tribute is paid to that help & hope extended by charitable organizations (for the "starving Armenians") of several countries, of missionaries & of orphanages, etc. wonderfully helpful to the child survivors. A large section devoted to emigrations, resettlements, & of survivor's responses & their moral reflections on the genocide is also unique to this book.The photographic reproductions are flunky due to inferior paper quality. If one is bent on reading 3 or 4 books on AG, this should be one of those books because it reflects with such great clarity the horrific evils of war & genocide on infants, children, mothers & the family structure. It examines the anatomy of human evils even when the flame of hope flickered with great uncertainty.

I have not read enough in this book to comment on it yet. What little I have read I would give it the four star rating.

Very sad presenationIt would be good as movie materialEgoyan we need another artistic production of all these stories put togetherOur parents and grandparents were part of thisNo better way than to put this type of context into a movie format

Well written. Informative

This book kept me riveted. I could not imagine the terrible things the Armenians faced and continue to face due to those who deny this tragedy.

If you could give six stars, this book would get it. It should be required reading for high school or college students. It should be required reading for revisionist historians like Stanford Shaw, Bernard Lewis, Justin McCarthy, and Heath Lowry--or any other Turkish "historian". Putting aside all the politics and theories, this book simply focuses on the suffering of the Armenians who went through the Genocide of 1915. It is as much a sociology book as a historical one. The parallels between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust become obvious as one reads the accounts. It is an invaluable primary source for further study of the Armenian Genocide, as most of the survivors are dying off. It is an easy read, but you will probably find yourself disgusted or teary-eyed during much of it. It is objective, simply telling the facts, including descriptions of good, helpful Turks. If you know little about the subject, this is a great place to start. For those who get to caught up in the politics of events, this is a great book to remember the horrific suffering of these human beings. And for those revisionists and neo-Young Turks who still deny the wholesale extermination of the Armenians, I can't think of a better book to force someone to start accepting the truth.

This is a most incredible collection of quotes and accounts from non-survivor firsthand sources (like missionaries and orphanage workers), interviews from survivors themselves, and history of the genocide of 1915, Armenian life before and after the genocide, and the massacres which took place in 1909 and 1895-97, as well as a great appendix on the questions they asked the survivors (which contrary to the tired old historical revisionist claims of the Turks, are NOT leading or loaded, but rather straightforward questions about things like what life was like in their neighbourhood before the genocide, how the household was run, what types of relations they had with local Turks, feelings of guilt they may have had, how they adjusted to life in a new country or orphanage, escape attempts, that sort of thing). There's also a great section on the types of reponses survivors have had to the genocide, like guilt, anger, sorrow, depression, terrorism, forgiveness, etc. There need to be more books published like this, but of course the Turks will typically continue to deny what their government did and insult the memory of the one and a half million Armenians who were butchered, engaging in all of the usual characteristics of those who deny genocide and who try to revise well-documented historical facts. Thankfully more and more nations are officially recognising the events of 1915 as genocide. And this comes from the perspective of someone who doesn't have any Armenian blood in her, nor any marital ties to Armenians; I'm just an Armenophile odar who has felt great love for and solidarity with the Armenian people since I found out about the genocide in the spring of 1995 at the age of fifteen.

I bought this thinking that the majority of the book would be a record of what the interviewed had actually said. Instead there is little of that as the authors have then taken it upon themselves to sum up the words of the survivors into their own (the authors) words. I therefore felt as though I was missing the whole point of an oral history which is hearing the story in the survivors own words. If you are looking for an oral history in the style of forgotten voices or want to actually read what the survivors actually said then this is not thee book for you. The other irrittating part of this book is the political agenda, given the nature of the events the survivors words are more than enough to portray the horror of the event

This is an excellent book that gives a concise and accurate history of the Armenian massacres. I found many books on this subject to be quite bias, this one is not.