To The Desert, a childhood diary account of the Armenian Genocide by Vahram Dadrian, is a powerful reminder that hate amongst adults also effects the most vulnerable in society, children. The release of Vahram Dadrian's childhood diary by the Gomidas Institute is very timely given that this year it will be 90 years since the Armenian Genocide began as well as a year that has seen genocide occur once more, in Darfur. It is a useful exercise to look at the diary of Vahram Dadrian, living under the threat of extermination by the Turks, since Vahram was actually living through the terrors that would come to be known as the Armenian Genocide and his diary is therefore quite graphic. There is an element of shellshock in his accounts and it certainly contains little self-analysis.

Adolescence.
We see Vahram grow up from the age of 15 years old and his diaries attest to his living through an atmosphere of fear and hatred targeted at the authors people. The adaptability of Vahram Dadrian and indeed his stoicism is quite remarkable for children of his age. Vahram's Diary begins on May 11th 1915 by which time Armenians have become aware of what is happening to their fellow countryman. Vahram points out how certain laws within the Ottoman Empire precluded Armenians from living like their non-Armenian neighbours. However it is the childlike instances that make the diary so humane and powerful.

On 26th July 1915 Vahram reports;

"When I woke up this morning my mouth was dry and my tongue all white. I had hardly slept all night; evil thoughts kept turning over in my mind."

Vahram does not tell anybody about his troubles, and likewise the depression that often besets Anne is rarely transmitted to the adult world. Vahram's entry two days later is particularly moving as his family are finally evicted. He is wrapped up in a childlike reverie when he writes;

"I wanted to have a last look around the house before we left. My room how sad I had spent the most beautiful nights of my life there, sleeping, dreaming. The living room was also quiet and deserted. My study room with its desk and books."

He finally concludes,

"Destitution, loneliness and sadness are everywhere."

The Deportations
Descriptions of the deportations are often heard second hand and we often see that Vharam has written we heard today that such is his reliance on word of mouth stories for news of what is going on outside of his individual experience. He reports on some of the awful occurrences in an extremely clinical way in some respects.

Here is a description by Vahram from 23rd October 1916.

"One day Moush exploded with the bombshell that in Bitlis 3,000 Armenians had been disarmed and massacred on the road to Palou. The news of the massacre filled every Armenian's heart with deep pain and discouragement."

Vahram accounts for his fear at the prospects of what may face him and his family and their fellow Armenians in an almost non-personal and voiceless fashion since the emphasis always seems to be on others suffering. He is a true witness to human carnage on fellow humans, but as his age increases so the written observations of atrocities increase. He seems to become somewhat de-sensitised to the horrors around him and as the diaries move on in time, he has a terrible foreboding about the fate of the Armenians. When speaking of the Armenians of Chorum, he equates it with his own situation by explaining,

"It is now certain that we will not be spared the tragic fate planned for all the Armenians in Turkey."

As a result of his treatment, Vahram is made highly aware of his identity as stories of the fate of his compatriots filter through. This is portrayed in reference to the deportations and treatment of Armenians. Vahram reports them faithfully yet has difficulty comprehending the reasons behind such hatred. His more sophisticated understanding of what is happening to his people is a chronological construct and after a while there is almost a matter of factness about their reporting of the horrors. Vahram's diary is constantly referring to some of the horrors that are being committed by Turks, and the re-telling of witness testimony is remarkably similar. Here is Vahram's entry on 12 November 1917,

"The Yozgad carnage was no different from any other massacres of densely populated provinces. One could call them classic slaughters. First they deported about 500 prominent members of the city and martyred them on the road to Sivas. Three days later they put another caravan (approx 400 people) on the road and a week later another one and sent them on the same route as their compatriots who preceeded them. Then the rest of the population of the city was ordered to get ready to leave immediately."

In Vahram's diaries there is a constant, claustrophobic atmosphere of suffering and guilt. Suffering is unspoken, but everyone feels it on the caravans accompanying Vahram to what they assume to be their final destination. Vahram's expression of this is most noticeable at the end of his diary, when he appreciates the fact that whilst he survived, over a million Armenians did not.

Armenia's Anne Frank?
There are great similarities in the diaries of Anne Frank and Vahram Dadrian especially regarding the themes I have mentioned earlier in this review, but there are also great differences. Anne Frank's Diary is more of a psychological account. I believe it is
fair to suggest that females are far more comfortable with expressing their feelings than men, and are better at exploring their emotions. Consequently, Anne focuses an awful lot on how she feels and how the news is affecting her, along with the swings of her mood as
she hears different accounts of what is going on outside of the annex.

Vahram's on the other hand is a detailing of witness accounts. He rarely digs deep into his psyche to commit his feelings to paper. Instead he focuses on writing about the many instances that he hears about and witnesses, a result of which is that he becomes a chronicler of the Armenian Genocide. His diary can therefore be classed as more male in construction. Vahram occasionally lets his guard down, but rarely dwells on the personal affect of what is happening to him. Naturally one of the major and most tragic differences in the diaries is that Vahram actually managed to complete his. Sadly Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945, just weeks before the end of the war. She was a victim of conditions deliberately engendered to encourage typhus, a disease that claimed the lives of Jews and Armenians in both genocidal campaigns.

The Value of this Diary
Dadrian's diary is incredibly important to the memory of the Armenian Genocide because it is so detailed. It also serves up as many questions as it does answers, which is an essential aspect of any memoir if we are to continue to learn about our past. Dadrian places events and people within a chronology of the genocide thereby adding flesh and reality to what otherwise are simply statistics. So as Turkey begins its ridiculous efforts to discredit the British Blue Book, a lot of Vahram's experiences illustrate that what took place between 1915, when the diary starts, and it';s end in 1919, was State sponsored, systematic, bureaucratic mass murder, and therefore genocide. Dadrian's diary personalises the suffering he and his fellow Armenians endured and is therefore more emotionally potent that any history book. Herein lies its real value.

To The Desert should be read alongside the British Blue Book, enabling the reader to see the overall scale of the genocide, whilst also understanding how the events detailed within affected individual victims of those horrors.

The book is available through www.garodbooks.com

Anoush Mkrtchian