53 Years Later It Still Impacts Me

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When I was a kid, my best friend was a big Armenian kid named Marty Harutunian. Marty could throw a baseball like a cannon. I lived three houses away, and since I was a catcher, we spent years playing “pitch and hit” —day after day, year after year.

Marty had an uncle who visited often. His Armenian name was long and impossible for me to pronounce, so I just called him “Uncle Bernie.” He never seemed to mind.

Every year around April, old 70+ year old Uncle Bernie would show up and take Marty to a memorial for the Armenian massacre that began on April 24, 1915—the destruction of an ancient Christian people under the Islamic Ottoman Empire. If I happened to be at the house, which I usually was, Uncle Bernie insisted I come along.

“You’re Marty’s friend,” he would say. “Friends go together.” To a teenager, the memorials felt long and solemn and, frankly, boring. But Uncle Bernie had a tradition. Afterward he would take us to McDonald’s and tell us to order whatever we wanted.

For a kid who grew up pretty poor, that part of the day, at McDonalds was heaven.

Then one year, when I was sixteen, Uncle Bernie came by again. By that point I had all the arrogance of a teenage boy who thinks he knows everything. I told him I wasn’t going this time. Then, with the careless stupidity that only youth can produce, I added:

“How do we even know any of that stuff is true?” The room went silent.

Uncle Bernie froze. He looked straight at me—hard, steady, unblinking.

Without saying a word, he grabbed his shirt and ripped it open. Buttons flew across the room. There, running from his stomach to his chest, was a jagged scar—an inch wide and twisted like lightning. It was the ugliest scar I have ever seen.

Then he told his story. He had been fifteen years old. Turkish soldiers burst into their home. His mother, father, and siblings were bayoneted in front of him. Then they stabbed him too.

The family lay dead on the floor. But somehow—through shock, terror, and unimaginable pain—he had the presence of mind to lie still and pretend to be dead. When the soldiers finally left, he pushed a rag into the open wound in his stomach and ran.

He ran for his life for two days. Finally, he collapsed, totally passed out, in a field. The field belonged to an Islamic family. They dragged the dying boy into their house. The mother took a needle and thread and literally sewed him back together—stomach, intestines, skin. When he woke, he burned with fever for days. Somehow the 15-year-old survived!

Eventually they gave him a little food and told him he had to leave immediately—because if anyone discovered they had helped him, the entire family would be executed. So, he walked away again. Somehow, he reached Russian lines.

And sixty years later, he stood in a small American living room, showing a cocky teenager the proof carved across his chest. I felt about two inches tall. And yes—I went with him that year. And yes—he still took me to McDonald’s afterward.

But I was a different person on the ride home.
That day left me with a few lessons that have stayed with me for more than 53 years:

First: Evil is real, and when it becomes radicalized Islam and organized, it will destroy entire peoples without mercy.

Second: Even in the middle of evil, humanity can still exist. An Islamic family risked their lives to save a dying Christian boy they did not know.

Third: The world ignores genocide at its peril. When atrocities go unrecognized or unpunished, they echo forward into history. The Armenian massacre still remains internationally unrecognized for the most part, and this is a great wrong

Fourth: The world must never forget what happened to the Armenian people—2.5 million Christians slaughtered in one of the great unacknowledged tragedies of the 20th century. That same radical Islam exists today in Iran, with nuclear missiles that can reach the USA in the not-too-distant future if we did nothing.

I learned all of that from a scar… and from a man I once knew simply as Uncle Bernie. May there be no more religious pogroms anywhere, is my prayer and hope. May the Lord Jesus come soon and establish his Kingdom.

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