Teachers fill in gaps on genocide

March 08, 2006
TMC
Chicago Tribune (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge
lblack@tribune.com

Mary Olson has told the story many times before, about men clubbed with shovels and buried alive, and women marched into the desert to die with their babies.

She tells of a family--her family--fleeing Turkish officers during World War I and how they tried to save themselves by attempting to sacrifice their youngest.

Weaving snippets of her family's personal history into a horrific retelling of Armenian genocide, Olson transfixed a teenage audience during a recent U.S. history class at Warren Township High School in Gurnee.

Olson has given the speech for years but has found herself in greater demand since the state approved a law that requires that acts of genocide--above and beyond the Holocaust--be included in elementary and high school curricula.
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Social studies teachers throughout Illinois have taken note since the law took effect in August, said Phyllis Henry, president of the Illinois Council for the Social Studies.
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"If you look at textbooks, depending on how old they are . . . sometimes they only have a paragraph on the Armenian genocide," said Henry, manager of social studies for the Chicago Public Schools.
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In Massachusetts the Assembly of Turkish American Associations sued the school system after educators removed Turkish Web sites from a curriculum aimed at teaching about genocide.

Narguiz Abbaszade, spokeswoman for the assembly, said the lawsuit was "purely a freedom-of-speech issue."

"The Turkish community feels they are not able to put forward their interpretation of what happened," she said. The lawsuit is ongoing.

Olson said she wanted to try to prove that the Turkish side is "revisionist history."

"Armenians were second-class citizens in Turkey. The Turks were trying for a long time to find a way to rid themselves of the Christians," Olson said.

At one point she talked about a husband and wife who believed that the only way they could escape the Turks while hiding in a mountainous region was to throw the youngest of their three children over a cliff. That way, they could carry the other two children for miles. But the little boy survived after landing on a ledge, and his cries alerted their foes.

The family members were caught and tortured. They survived the ordeal but resented the child because his survival led to their capture, she said."How do I know that story?" she said. "The little boy was my uncle by marriage."Students were aghast but curious.

"Usually when anyone talks about genocide or anything like this, people automatically think of World War II," said junior Lisa Alvin, 16, of Wadsworth.

"These people were so desperate," she said. "The choices that they had to make . . . that they would have to kill one of their children for the rest of the group to survive. That would be so hard."
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Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.