Three years ago, I read The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel. I think it was the first work I have read about the Armenian genocide. Until now, I knew that this historical event happened, yet I didn't really know the context of it. I even visited Armenia in 2013, but the whole topic of the genocide didn't really factor in my consciousness. So I decided to pick up this book, not only to learn about the genocide from a factual perspective (Franz Werfel's book was fiction, even though it was based on historical events), but also to read something from an Armenian author. Hence I picked up Grigoris Balakian's memoir.
This is a massive book: there is about 430-something pages of main text, in addition to plenty of glossaries and other reference items. And it chronicles the author's time, starting from when he was living in Berlin, to when he returns to Constantinople when World War I starts, to his arrest and deportation to Der Zor. He miraculously survives along the way, and he employs several other tricks in order to remain alive. As he reaches Southeastern Anatolia, he manages to reverse course and escape, spending a majority of time hiding, until he returns to Constantinople, and onward to Europe, leaving Turkey for good.
He writes about the trials and tribulations of the Armenian people that he has accompanied throughout his exile. It also shows how genocide is absolutely the epitome of evil. He writes about how Armenians are systematically killed by the Ottoman government. I am more familiar with the Holocaust than the Armenian genocide, and I suppose as the Armenian genocide happened a few decades before the Holocaust, the methods of killing were less sophisticated. The Armenian genocide involved plenty of brute hacking, dismembering, and similar acts, that sometimes, reading the pages of this book was just hard.
In any case, I learned a lot about this historical event. It is such a moving piece of literature, that I would consider it a must-read for anyone wanting to know more about this episode in history. I give it 5 out of 5 stars.
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