Senior psychology major

In the midst of World War I, in a humble region of Europe between the Black and Caspian seas, more than a million innocent people died — not of warfare, but of brutal torture, starvation and murder. And hardly anyone even knows. That is why today, April 24, has been set aside as Remembrance Day for the Armenian genocide.

Here in the U.S., schoolchildren learn about the Holocaust during their world history studies and also frequently read about it in English classes. Many of you have probably visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and unless you’re completely oblivious, you are likely aware that there is genocide occurring this very moment in parts of Africa. Movements and groups have formed all over the world in an effort to stop these atrocities from continuing.

But this sense of global consciousness was absent from our mindset up until just a few decades ago, and the ability to gather information about other nations and the plight of their people was much more limited. Thus many horrific events, such as the genocide of the Armenian people, went almost unnoticed by the rest of the world for many years.

Armenia is a tiny country nestled in the Caucasus Mountains. For centuries, the people there had lived under Turkish rule during the Ottoman Empire. The Turks were Muslims, while Armenia is full of Christians — it’s officially the oldest Christian nation, in fact. After being absorbed by their more powerful neighbor, the Armenians were treated as second-rate citizens by their rulers and were denied many civil and economic rights. More serious problems began to arise in the late 1800s, when Turkish nationalism spread and the new Young Turk regime felt the Armenian minority should be wiped out.

In 1915, Young Turk officials murdered Armenian leaders, leaving the people without guidance. Armenian men were forced to give up their heritage and religion and become Turkish soldiers during World War I, where they were killed in battle, or by Turkish officials, if they were lucky enough to survive.

Meanwhile, the elderly, women and children were led on death marches to the Syrian Desert. They were tortured, raped and starved along the way; most died before even reaching their “final destination,” where those remaining were killed. The atrocities didn’t cease until the war ended, but by then more than 1.5 million innocent people had perished and more than two million had been displaced from their homeland. Some lucky ones, including my ancestors, escaped to America.

I’ll bet you didn’t know about that. That’s because it’s not even in history textbooks — at least not the ones I remember. As an Armenian, I find it appalling that this atrocity can be left out of the books. I don’t care what the publisher’s reason is for not including it, be it ignorance or political bias — current U.S.-Turkey relations should not impact our right to know the truth about the past. There is no excuse for ignoring a monstrous massacre such as this.

In trying to justify his treatment of the Jewish people during the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler once infamously said, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Today I speak about it, in the hopes that now you will, too, so that something like this will not happen in the future. Let us prove Hitler wrong by taking this Day of Remembrance to honor those who have lost their lives simply because of their religion or ethnicity. And let us never again allow the human race to forget and repeat our mistakes.

Lauren Mendelsohn is a senior psychology major. She can be reached at lmendel1@terpmail.umd.edu.