My Reading Life

"There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Serbs and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?" (160)There are many lost secrets and horrors among the civilizations inhabiting our world. Unfortunately, we will never know all of them. But the fact that an estimated one and a half million Armenians were slaughtered and left to die in the desert of starvation and disease in the early years of the nineteenth century should be talked of or remembered so infrequently is tragic. Maybe it is because the government of Turkey still claims this mass killing of Armenians during WWI wasn't "genocide"....maybe it is because we continue to ignore the horrors in front of us today. The stories intertwined in this work of fiction introduce the reader to the atrocities that occurred years before the Holocaust of WWII. The atrocities that are not as "famous" as the Nazis' annihilation of the Jews. We ask, "How did this happen?' of the Holocaust, yet the stage had been set years before when the Turks committed genocide upon the Armenian population. The question, then should be, "How do we continue to let this happen in our world?" Because the Jews were not the last to be murdered in large numbers. Many were yet to come in Cambodia, and Serbia, and Rwanda....As a work of fiction, 'The Sandcastle Girls' is not as gruesome as the truth, but instead allows the reader space to consider the terrors and horror of this period in history. Hopefully encouraging one to read more, learn more, so that one day, one day in the future we may finally end the ideological idiocy of killing another human because of his or her race, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, and on and on...Further information regarding the Armenian Genocide can be found here: http://www.armenian-genocide.org/genocide.html