No Turk can say “I didn’t know about it” when hearing about the tortures the Armenians suffered from the Turks. Ignorance is no excuse, especially now, the Italian newspaper Notizie Radicali writes in an article about the book by Mikail Mikaelian, Armenian migrant in France.

Surviving Genocide in his teens, Mikaelian fled to France, where he studied medicine and worked at the French-Ethiopian railway in Ethiopia. During the World War II, he joined the Free French Forces. After the war he was a chief medical officer at the port in Marseille.

The article reads, in part:

“In order not to go mad, Mikaelian wrote what he lived through, hoping to publish it once. Unfortunately, the manuscript disappeared in 1992. For a long time Mikail wanted to re-write his memories. In Beirut and then in Ethiopia he tried to restore the pieces of his broken life. He devoted the book to his mother…

On each page you have to stop to force through reading further. He writes about his small cousin, dying from hunger and sufferings: “Her body was a skeleton, We buried her in the sand on the river bank. We had no power to cry. But we loved her…”

He also writes about the story of a tortured young woman, who didn’t cry over her dead mother: “Why should I cry? My mother was saved from the horrors of the Turks.”

The conclusion to be made is that Turkey isn’t ready to enter the EU unless it is ready to face its past, editor of the book Litta Modignani says.”