Anyush (39 page)

The character of Colonel Kamil Abdul-Khan is based upon an amalgamation of the Governor of Trebizond, Colonel Abdul-Kadar Aintabli, and a man known as the ‘Monster of Trebizond’, Djemal Azmi. I first came across Abdul-Kadar Aintabli in a document from the Armenian National Institute detailing the eyewitness account of a Turkish army officer, Lieutenant Sayied Ahmet Moukhtar Baas, which was circulated to the War Cabinet on 26 December 1916. In his statement he talks of the Governor’s infamy for his ‘atrocities against Armenians’ and how he had the Bishop of Trebizond murdered at night, which gave me the idea of setting the headquarters of the National Guard in the Bishop’s Palace. I could find no specific information on what became of the colonel after the war, but had more success with the fates of Djemal Azmi and his superior officers, the members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), a Turkish nationalist grouping. These were the so-called ‘Three Young Turks’ or ‘Three Pashas’ who were the instigators of the genocide and whose portrait hangs in Abdul-Khan’s office in the story.

After the fall of Constantinople to the Allies in 1918 and the signing of the Armistice of Mudros, the leader of the CUP, Talat Pasha, resigned on 14 October and fled Turkey in a German submarine on 3 November. Sultan Mehmed VI instigated a court martial to punish the CUP for the Empire’s ill-conceived involvement in the First World War and ‘the massacre and destruction of the Armenians’. The three members of the CUP, Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha and Djemal Pasha were sentenced to death, but all of them had fled to Germany. British Intelligence pressured the Grand Vizier to demand that Germany extradite the Pashas to stand trial, but Germany responded that it would do so only if papers could be
produced proving that the men had been found guilty.

On 15 March 1921, Talat Pasha was killed by a single gunshot as he came out of his house in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin by Soghomon Tehlirian, a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), as part of Operation Nemesis to assassinate all members of the CUP and those guilty of crimes against Armenians.

On 25 July 1922, Djemal Pasha was assassinated by the ARF in Tbilisi.

The third member of the triumvirate, Enver Pasha, fled first to Germany and then to Moscow. Having had his services as ex-leader of the army rejected by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) in the Turkish War of Independence in 1921, he travelled to Russian Turkestan on Lenin’s behalf to suppress a Basmachi uprising. After defecting to the rebel side, he was killed by an officer of the Red Army, a soldier of Armenian extraction by the name of Agop Melkumian, on 4 or 8 August 1922.

The ‘Monster of Trebizond’, Djemal Azmi, accused of drowning 15,000 Armenians, was sentenced to death by a Turkish court martial in 1919, but the sentence was never carried out. He was assassinated in Berlin by Arshavir Shiragian on 17 April 1922.

On 26 April 1856 Henry Morgenthau was born in Mannheim, Germany, into a Bavarian Jewish family. His father, Lazarus, moved the family to America in 1866, and they eventually became naturalised American citizens. Henry attended the City College of New York as an undergraduate, followed by Columbia Law School, and set up practice, amassing a sizeable fortune in real estate. In 1882, he married Josephine Sykes, and together they had four children. He became a prominent supporter of the Democratic Party and served as their Finance Chairman in 1912 and
again in 1916 during Woodrow Wilson’s presidential campaigns. Wilson appointed Morgenthau US Ambassador to Turkey in 1913 where he served for three years. During the genocide he appealed both to Talat Pasha and the German military leaders to stop the massacre of Armenians but without success. He wrote to American and European newspapers about what he called ‘The Murder of a Nation’ and appealed for funds to support the refugees in concentration camps. After the war, he attended the Paris Peace Conference as an expert on the Middle East and went on to become involved in many war-related charitable bodies, including the Relief Committee for the Middle East, the Greek Refugee Settlement Commission and the Red Cross. In 1919, he headed the US government fact-finding mission to Poland on the treatment of Polish Jews, and, in 1933, he was one of the American representatives at the Geneva Conference. He wrote the first part of his memoir,
Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story
in 1918, documenting his experiences in Turkey, and went on to write several more volumes covering his time in Poland and Greece.

Henry Morgenthau died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 25 November 1946, aged ninety.

Ellen Mary Norton-Gerard was born in Lake City, Minnesota, in 1883. She trained as a nurse and in 1918 volunteered with Near East Relief to serve three years in Lebanon and Syria. Working at the Armenian Orphanage Hospital in Aleppo, she had over a thousand children in her care, orphaned by the Armenian Genocide. In 1922, she married Frank RJ Gerard in India and moved to Santa Barbara, California, in 1941, where she worked at the Hoff Army Hospital. The Gerards had two daughters, Mary and Hélène.

Ellen Mary took many photographs during her time in Aleppo and Beirut and had more from her travels to Egypt, the Ottoman Empire and India. In 2000, an album of her photographs and some loose photographs were discovered in a military antiques shop in the Los Angeles area, which are now available to view online. Ellen Mary is often pictured surrounded by the children in her care and with her dog Spot. Two memorable photographs in the album are of the ‘blind boy’ and the ‘desert boy’, and the character of Arshak is a composite of both.

Ellen Mary died in 1966 at the age of eighty-three.

About the Author

Martine Madden was born in Limerick and worked in Dublin before moving to the United Arab Emirates with her husband John. In the oasis town of Al Ain she came to meet two Lebanese Armenians who were the first to tell her about the Armenian Genocide. Their stories and the much later discovery of Armin Wegner’s genocide photographs prompted her interest in Armenian history and formed the basis of the novel
Anyush
.

Martine returned to Ireland in 1990 and now lives in the Midlands with her husband and family.

NEW FICTION FROM

From a piano abandoned on the strife-torn streets of Dublin at Easter 1916, Mary Morrissy spins the reader backwards through the life of enigmatic beauty Bella Casey, sister of the famed playwright Seán O’Casey.

‘Elegant and unadorned at the same time … an intimate portrait of a woman and a depiction of Irish history at its most extreme … a wonderful book from one of our finest writers.’

‘One of the most intelligent, well-written and well-researched historical novels I have read. Mary Morrissy is the Irish Hilary Mantel.’

‘Mary Morrissy has a genius for lifting characters out of the dim backgrounds of history and brilliantly illuminating them … she evokes the rich Dublin world of the plays of Seán O’Casey.’

A tense thriller that stalks the urban streets of southeast London and the bleak wilderness of the North Kent coast,
Hunting Shadows
introduces the forceful, compromised police detective, DI Ellen Kelly.

‘Wonderful characterisation and a gripping plot. DI Ellen Kelly’s mourning felt so tangible that it was heart-wrenching. This debut pulled me in straight away and I was hooked! A book that has stayed with me long after the reading.’

‘Terrific … compelling.’

‘Truly a tour de force. Imagine a collaboration between Anne Tyler and AM Homes. Yes, the novel is that good. This is great writing.’

‘A most assured debut.’