By Naush Boghossian
Staff Writer

Sunday, May 08, 2005 - Samuel Kadorian shakes his head in frustration, sheepishly shrugs his shoulders and mutters “old age, old age,” when he can’t remember the maiden name of his beloved wife, Mary.

But sitting in his Sherman Oaks apartment, the 98-year-old vividly recalls a horrific memory from 1915, when he was just 8, and Armenians were rounded up in Turkey: A baby wouldn’t stop crying, he said, so one Turkish soldier threw the infant up into the air and another caught the child on his bayonet.

Those memories will never be erased, said Kadorian, one of the last survivors of what is known as the Armenian Genocide – the organized killing of 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey beginning in 1915.

“I can’t take it out,” said the frail man, pointing to his head. “I may forgive them, but forget – never, never, never.”

For nearly 40 years, UCLA professor Richard Hovannisian has overseen a project – the largest oral history project in the Armenian community – to interview survivors and record stories like Kadorian’s.

Students in his course were each required to interview 10 survivors, recording their memories on audio cassette tapes.

Just before the 90th anniversary this year of the mass killings, commemorated on April 24, the 72-year-old professor reached a landmark: He digitized all 800 interviews conducted by his students over the last four decades.

Of the hundreds of people his students interviewed, Hovannisian believes no more than 25 are still alive.

“This is an important contribution to the preservation of history and the understanding of what occurred to the Armenian people under the cover of World War I,” he said. “It’s important especially in view of denial of genocide by the Turkish government. Fortunately, some Turkish scholars are now challenging the state, insisting there was ethnic cleansing.”

The Turkish government maintains there was no organized, systematic killing of Armenians, arguing that those slain were casualties of war.

Recent communication between the prime minister of Turkey and the president of Armenia have opened the door to dialogue between the two governments in an effort to improve relations and begin researching historical archives.

“Has Professor Hovannisian interviewed families or descendants of any of the Turkish or Muslim families killed by Armenians?” said Engin Ansay, consul general of Turkey in Los Angeles. “But I don’t want to engage in a game of one-upmanship. That is not my intent.

“I strongly believe a dialogue is essential and also an understanding between Armenian Diasporans and Turkish-Americans.”

Life’s work

The project has been a large part of Hovannisian’s life’s work. The shelves in his office are stacked with books on genocide, and there are boxes and boxes of cassettes, organized alphabetically – “Seropian-Stepanian,” “Kizikian-Mandroian.”