He then perseveres to find sustenance, flea-infested shelter, and eventually a sympathetic host. Hunted by the Turks, he eludes death at the point of a soldier’s rifle. Stepan’s escape leaves him destitute and at the mercy of the local population. But the irony of Stepan’s epiphany to present-day readers goes further, because the place where he learns the fate in store for him is Raqqa-a city that now hosts the headquarters of a new ethnic-cleansing regime, the so-called Islamic State. A scene in which Stepan finally grasps the ultimate nature of the genocide is hauntingly reminiscent of an incident in Elie Wiesel’s Night. Numerous passages bring to mind events of the Holocaust: gradual erosion of liberties willful blindness of the surrounding population deportations in cattle cars betrayals and fruitless attempts at resistance and, in the aftermath, hushed kitchen-table reminiscences half-reaching children’s ears.

In those authoritarian countries, she has her share of uneasy moments while following her journalistic instincts, but it’s a pale shadow of what her grandfather went through. Soon, his life goes from grim to gruesome, but MacKeen lightens the otherwise depressing narrative with alternating chapters in which she describes, with self-effacing candor, her cautious foray into the hinterlands of Turkey and Syria. Slight of build, resourceful, and sharp-witted, he’s initially ensnared and jailed for transporting, legally, a shipment of firearms. We’re introduced to Stepan as a young, small-town peddler and commercial courier in western Turkey before World War I. “My grandfather had left a road map to his life,” she writes. Most significantly, she makes a voyage of her own, in 2007, to retrace the steps of his ordeal. MacKeen brings Stepan to life with a terse style that echoes his writing, drawing also on carefully annotated historical research and on interviews with his still-living centenarian cousin and relatives of other victims. Stepan’s intention was clear: “Being a witness to that satanic pogrom, I vowed it as my duty to put on paper what I saw.” Now, MacKeen and her mother recover Stepan’s missing notebooks, which enable MacKean to write this book, a haunting journal of remembrance. Granddaughter Dawn MacKeen, who was three years old when Stepan died, forsakes a career as a health-care journalist in New York and returns home to Southern California, answering her mother’s longtime plea to “tell Baba’s story.” It’s history’s good fortune that a third-generation descendant has reconstructed this vivid, personal account at a hundred year’s distance.Ī partial account was published long before in the Armenian press. It's filled with edge-of-your-seat escapes and accounts of lifesaving kindnesses in the harsh desert.Fast-forward to 2006. Part reportage, part memoir, The Hundred-Year Walk alternates between Stepan's tale of resilience and Dawn's remarkable journey, giving us a rare firsthand account of the twentieth century's first genocide. Using his long-lost journals as a guide, she reconstructs her grandfather's odyssey to the far reaches of the Ottoman Empire, where he found himself in the midst of unspeakable atrocities. Longing for a fuller picture of Stepan's life-and the lost home her family fled-Dawn travels alone to Turkey and Syria, across a landscape still rife with tension. Growing up, Dawn MacKeen heard fragments of her grandfather Stepan's story, of how he was swept up in the deadly mass deportation of Armenians during World War I and of how he miraculously managed to escape.

'The inspiring story of a young Armenian's harrowing escape from genocide and of his granddaughter's quest to retrace his steps.

A hundred year walk