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Documentary Revives Amb. Morgenthau's Work & Legacy

By Angelike Contis
Published in The National Herald

November 6, 2009

Special to The National Herald

NEW YORK - Imagine being an ambassador and knowing that an ethnic group is being murdered in the country where you live – but no one is intervening. This was the dilemma faced by Henry Morgenthau, the subject of Apo Torosyan's documentary "The Morgenthau Story".

A couple of years after being sent to Turkey, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Morgenthau realized in 1915 that Armenians were being slaughtered. The New Yorker campaigned to stop what he called "the murder of a nation". Though he was not able to stop the killings, Morgenthau's 30,000 pages of documents remain some of the most important evidence of the genocide that Turkey still has not recognized.

Torosyan, a Massachusetts-based visual artist, attended a screening of the documentary at the Archdiocesan Hellenic Cultural Center on October 25. Torosyan was born in Constantantinople of an Armenian father and a Greek mother.

The documentary had an oral testimony feel, with its simple interviews, stark archival material and no-frills approach (save the occasional stirring cello music of Haig Boydjian). It included the insights of the ambassador's grandsons, former New York County D.A. Robert M. Morgenthau and TV producer Henry Morgenthau III, and his great-granddaughter, Dr. Pamela Steiner.

The film began with the Jewish Morgenthau family's immigration from Germany to the U.S. when he was a child. It focused, however, on the time around 1916, when Morgenthau quit his post to return to the U.S. and write the book "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story" about the unfolding Armenian tragedy. Of great interest to the Hellenic Center audience was Morgenthau's later, successful role as the Chair of the Greek Resettlement Commission under the League of Nations in 1923.

In the documentary, the link between the genocides was underlined. One of Morgenthau's heirs recalled Adolf Hitler's words "After all, who remembers the Armenians?"

Torosyan, revealing encyclopedic knowledge, reviewed the roots of the Young Turk's atrocities against Armenians, as well as other minorities, including the Greeks.

The filmmaker called the non-recognition by Turkey of the genocide "a festering sore," but pointed out that recognition "can't be imposed" from outside, but must come from the Turkish people. Torosyan, who focused on the Armenian genocide in his conceptual art since 1999, made his first film in 2003 in order to reach a broader audience. The 1955 pogrom against Greeks in Constantinople, which he witnessed, has intrigued him as a future film topic.

Website: www.aramaifilms.com