By Alin K. Gregorian
Mirror-Spectator Staff
WATERTOWN — Most children do not have clear ideas about their parents’ childhoods. They might hear bits and pieces and use their imaginations to color in the lives of their parents as children. Perhaps few can imagine the stories of Goodbye, Antoura, the memoirs of Karnig Panian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide.
Panian’s memoirs were first published in Armenian in 1992 by Hamazkayin Cultural Association and the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia. Now the volume has been translated into English, and published this year by the Stanford University Press, with a foreword by Dr. Vartan Gregorian. It has received great reviews both in the US and Lebanon.
Panian was born in Gurin in 1910. He was 5 when his mother and a younger sister and brother perished during the forcible marches. His father had been among the men who had been rounded up by the authorities in a previous sweep.