“Aurora’s Sunrise” Sheds Unique Light on Armenian Genocide and the Power of Publicity

“Publicity,” Louis Brandeis wrote in 1913, “is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

When Brandeis was appointed to the Supreme Court three years later, a genocide was being perpetrated against ethnic Armenians. Numbering approximately 2.1 million in 1914, over the next few years mass executions and intentional starvation would cull the Armenian population by half, while systematic expropriation and deportation of those who survived would result in one of the century’s greatest diasporas, with only around 450,000 in-country in 1918.

For all that, and despite extensive contemporary press coverage of the massacres (e.g., roughly 145 articles by the New York Times in 1915 alone), the United States did not officially recognize what transpired as “genocide” until 2021; and to this day Turkey denies that genocide took place.

A recent documentary Aurora’s Sunrise (now screening/streaming on PBS) both shines additional light on what took place a century ago in modern-day Turkey and provides a unique meditation on the role publicity can play in exposing the dark corners of history. 

In 1915, Arshaluys Mardikian was leading a life “full of color” with her parents and six siblings in an Armenian town in the Ottoman Empire. In a matter of weeks, that family was gone, leaving 13-year-old Arshaluys alone in the world, held captive and regularly raped by the army that was exterminating her people.

Her odyssey over the next two years was harrowing. Surviving to a death march to the Euphrates River, only to witness the surviving young children being tossed into to waters already full of Armenian corpses. Kidnapped by bandits. Sold into slavery. Escape, recapture, escape, recapture. Sold into a harem. Escaping yet again. Stumbling into the Russian Revolution on her way to America, where she took on the special mission given to her by the legendary leader of Armenia’s national resistance: to tell the world what was happening to their people. 

Here Mardikian’s story takes its unlikeliest turn, as she not only becomes a cause célèbre in American newspapers but at age 17 stars in 1919’s Auction of Souls, a major motion picture that screened in numerous theaters throughout the U.S. and Europe. Also known as Ravished Armenia, the film was a central part of the Near East’s Relief campaign to raise $30 million for Armenian refugees. Now an international star (known by her Americanized name “Aurora Mardiganian”), a grueling year-long speaking tour followed, and in the end the Near East Relief raised almost four times their original goal and saved the lives of 132,000 orphans.

In the relatively new tradition of Waltz with Bashir and Tower, Aurora’s Sunrise employs animation to turn Mardikian’s words into images, which are intercut with both actual interview footage and surviving scenes from Auction of Souls. It’s a combination that gives us a truly intimate view of Mardikian’s journey which would otherwise be impossible. 

This, of course, includes the horrors. One of the most shocking examples concerns a clarification Mardikian makes about a scene in Auction of Souls of Armenian girls being murdered via crucifixion:

The crucifixion scene — they made it appear [relatively] civilized in the film. But I never told them about any crucifixion. The Turks didn’t make their crosses like that. In reality they sharpened sticks into kaziklar [Turkish: stakes] and impaled each woman through her groin, with stakes inside them, heads down, their bodies slumped over. That’s how the girls died.

Although (as former Times Executive Editor Bill Keller put it in 2004) “it seem[s] a no-brainer that killing a million people because they were Armenians fit[s] the definition” of genocide, semantics and politics often obscure such discussions. But Aurora’s Sunrise is a powerful example of how publicity can help us see things as they really are, which in turn should help us speak — and act — accordingly.

Watch Aurora’s Sunrise on PBS.