My Grandmother

When Fethiye Cetin was growing up in the small Turkish town of Maden, she knew her grandmother as a happy and universally respected Muslim housewife. It would be decades before her grandmother told her the truth: that she was by birth a Christian and an Armenian, that her name was not Seher but Heranush, that most of the men in her village had been slaughtered in 1915, and that she, along with many women and children, had been sent on a death march. There are an estimate two million Turks whose grandparents could tell them similar stories, but in a country that maintains the Armenian Genocide never happened, such talk can be dangerous.