MY GRANDMOTHER * ASIA MINOR

I've read many many stories and accounts of the events in Asia Minor from 1915, the Armenian Genocide, to 1922, the Greek Catastrophe, when my grandmother and her siblings fled from their home and village to Smyrna where they awaited a savior. Since I'm here, you know that my grandmother survived the catastrophe, but there were many more stories, and this is one of them.
My Grandmother by Fethiye Cetin is written by a Turkish human rights lawyer, who as an adult, learned that her beloved grandmother, a "convert" was Armenian, and a survivor of a death march during the Armenian genocide of 1915. It turned Fethiye's world upside down. She had been taught that the Armenians died fighting against the turks, and that the Armenians then left the country. What, 1.5 million people got up and moved to other places? No, they were systematically murdered and marched out. The turkish state still denies any of the violent events they conducted in order to eliminate the Christian population from their country. Fethiye Cetin handles this story with honesty, and with honor. She believed her grandmother, and dealt with the information the way so many of us do when apprised of secrets and cover ups within our families and past. She sometimes zealously probed for more information, while at other times, years would go by where she did almost nothing to make contact with her Armenian American family in order to face their tangled past.
After the Greek catastrophe in 1922, Greece and the new country, Turkey, conducted a "population exchange" 1.5 million Asia Minor greeks were sent to Greece, and 500,000 muslims were moved from Greece to Turkey. Still, one wonders, were any of our relatives "saved" by a turkish family? Do we have family there? Mostly all the survivors have died, and their children are aging. The story is disappearing for all but those activists who are working to try to get the turkish government to acknowledge their actions in 1915 and 1922. If you want to know more, but don't want to read the book, here is a short interview with the author. I loved this book.