"Who does now remember the Armenians?"

This quote from Adolf Hitler (1939), justifying his argument that the world soon forgets the extermination of a people, appears at the beginning of Forgotten Fire by Adam Bagdasarian (813B1462f2002). The book is Bagdasarian's fictionalized account of his great-uncle's childhood experience from 1915 to about 1918 during the Armenian genocide in Turkey.



Told in spare language, the novel movingly portrays what a twelve-year old might have seen and felt as his world is utterly and irrevocably changed. He watches helplessly as his father and uncle are taken away and his brothers are killed. From one day to the next, Vahan does not know if he or those around him will survive. I tore through this book, astonished by the relentlessness of the unfolding events. It is awful, it is riveting, it is required reading.