Genocide Descending: Half-Jews in Poland and Half-Armenians in Turkey

Abstract

All the consequences of Armenian genocide and Jewish Shoah are still not fully realised or comprehended. In addition to the systematic annihilation of populations and cultures, the fates of the survivors continue to be a tragic reverberation of the genocidal events. In both cases, most of the survivors escaped to other countries and later became subjects and objects of a number of biographies and studies. However, not every survivor fled. In both genocides, there were also a remarkable number of victimised individuals who survived the massacres through negligence of the murderers, or by being taken to families, and continued to live in the country of the atrocities, changing or hiding their religious and cultural identity or becoming victims of forced change of identity.
The existence of these peoples in Poland and Turkey remained a curious unrecognized subject that extremely little was known of until recently. In this article, the present situation of both of these groups is discussed in comparative terms in order to outline the character of their identity problems. The comparison is all the more interesting due to the fact that obvious differences between the two social contexts underline the significance of the common factors in the post-genocidal experience.