by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch, writer of war fiction
Because most of my 20 published books show war or genocide through the eyes of a young person, some of my author colleagues affectionately call me the Genocide Queen. I didn’t consciously choose to write about genocide, but I have a compulsion to give a voice to people whose stories are not told.
When I began writing genocide fiction, it was an intensely personal journey. For me, the act of writing is similar to the act of reading. I write the novels that can’t find in the bookstore. My hope is that readers pick up my books for a page-turning story, but that empathy for the victims and survivors stays with them.
Before I began writing books, I was freelance writer and my favorite thing was to interview local people about their family’s immigration experience. I did a story on my own Ukrainian grandfather’s journey to Canada in 1913 and how when WWI broke out he was interned in Canada as an “enemy alien”, another was about a Vietnamese Boat Person’s horrific journey to freedom, but the most memorable was when I interviewed the son of an Armenian Genocide survivor.
I wrote up the Armenian story as told by his son, but I couldn’t sleep at night, thinking of all the unanswered questions. The son only knew portions because his father wouldn’t talk much about what he had lived through and now he was dead. I tried to research the era, but hit upon a wall. This was the late 1980s, before the internet. The Armenian Genocide had not yet been acknowledged by the world and it was very difficult to find material. There were special interest groups devoted to ensuring that the information was suppressed. They’d buy up and destroy the books on the topic as quickly as they were published. My own library had only a single book on the Armenian Genocide, David Kherdian’s The Road From Home.
I became a document detective, sleuthing out scant primary sources with all the pre-internet tools available. I also reached out to Armenian scholars but they were understandably skeptical of my motives, so I wrote the initial draft of my first novel set during the Armenian Genocide in a vacuum. Once it was completed, I snail-mailed the entire manuscript to a number of Armenian scholars as proof of my sincerity, and asked for assistance. I especially wanted to interview genocide survivors. This time, a flood of assistance came.
I reached my next hurdle after polishing the manuscript and sending it out to publishers. Because there wasn’t a body of work on the Armenian Genocide, publishers felt there was no interest in the topic. That first manuscript got more than 100 rejections.
I tore it apart and tried again, this time writing a simpler narrative geared towards young adults, but again, no luck, for the same reason, even though by this time I’d had two other books published on different topics. So I went back to the drawing board and intertwined a single thread of my original 500 page genocide novel into the story of a contemporary anorexic teen who sees food as her enemy. She nearly dies from starvation, and in her near death experience, she steps into the shoes of her own great-grandmother on the banks of the Euphrates River as she and thousands of other Armenians are being starved to death.
I sent that manuscript out to publishers in 1997, which was just when the revelation of Princess Diana’s anorexia was in the news. The manuscript was snapped up and published as The Hunger in 1999. That novel is still in print and is used in classrooms in Canada and the US. As far as I know, it was the first YA novel to be written on the Armenian Genocide in the English language.
The tragedy of 9/11 made readers suddenly interested in unfamiliar history. All at once, my writing was in demand. Nobody’s Child was published in the fall of 2003. It was widely read and critically acclaimed, and then In April 2004, Canada officially acknowledged the Armenian Genocide.
Those two young adult novels were only a fraction of the Armenian Genocide story that I had written and researched. For many years I was anxious to find more about a group of 110 orphaned Armenian boys who had escaped Turkey and taken refuge in Corfu and eventually ended up in an orphanage-school-farm in Georgetown Ontario. I had located a set of taped interviews that the boys did among themselves at an archive in Toronto but the key interviews had been sealed until all of the Georgetown Boys had died. The last Boy died in 2005, so I went back and listened to the final tapes. These boys were eye witness survivors to an action in 1923 by Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. Only 15% of the Armenian population in Turkey had survived the genocide, and most of these were young children living as urchins on the streets, plus very old women, also homeless. In 1923, Ataturk expelled them, forcing thousands to walk across the continent to safety. They ended up in Greece, many of them without clothing or food, sleeping on beaches. Out of the thousands, Canada sponsored 110 of them, and one was the father of that interviewee. After listening to these freshly unsealed tapes, I was able to write two more books, set in 1923: Aram’s Choice and Call Me Aram. These are written in a simpler way than the YA novels and they’re meant to be read by 8 to 12 year olds – the same age as the original orphans.
In 2008, Daughter of War was published. It’s a companion novel to Nobody’s Child and The Hunger. By this time there was a flood of primary material available and so the novel is richer in detail than my earlier ones. The deniers could no longer keep the genie in the bottle.
I have received hate mail and death threats for writing about genocide, but ironically, it was for a 1600 word picture book (Enough) set during the Holodomor, not for the 200,000+ words I had written about the Armenian Genocide.
The Holodomor (which means death by hunger in Ukrainian) took place in 1933. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was angered by the people in Soviet Ukraine who refused to give up their religion and hand over their land to the communes. As retaliation, he sent in soldiers to remove all of their wheat and other foodstuffs, then sealed the borders so no one could escape. Any Ukrainian who was caught with a handful of wheat was shot as a traitor. Between five and ten million people starved to death – it’s hard to know exactly how many because the census takers were also shot. After the Ukrainians died, Stalin repopulated the area with Russians. Like in the case of the Armenian Genocide, there are interest groups determined that information about the Holodomor be suppressed, and these people not only burn books, they threaten the writers.
In 2000, my picture book Enough was published – about a young girl and her father who defy the dictator by hiding their grain in graves. It was the first commercial work of fiction to be published on the Holodomor. There had been academic works, but no fiction even for adults. In retrospect, it was pretty cheeky to write a picture book on the subject, but that’s how the story came to me.
When this book came out, I received threatening letters, emails and phone calls. For a time, I was required to advise police before I did a presentation. The threats went on for eight years, but by 2005, Ukraine democratically elected Victor Yushchenko as president despite extraordinary Russian interference which included the poisoning of Yushchenko. In 2008, Canada officially recognized the Holodomor as a genocide. Yushchenko visited Canada and I was invited to meet him. He awarded me the Order of Princess Olha for writing Enough. (So I guess I’m a Genocide Princess, not a Queen!) That same year, I received my final piece of hate mail.
I’ve also written books on little known aspects of WWII, WWI and Vietnamese refugees.
My website is www.calla.com if you’d like to find out more.