Vahan Kenderian's Forgotten Fire

According to The New York Times, the Armenian Genocide killed upwards of 1.5 million innocent Armenians. Forgotten Fire is a fictional book about a character named Vahan Kenderian and his journey through the Armenian genocide. His journey is very closely aligned with those of real life genocide survivors who have lived to tell their stories and even those who have not. Fictional character Vahan Kenderian shared a similar journey with Loung Ung as they both survived a genocide at a very young age. Vahan and Loung are very similar in that they both suffered through a genocide at a very young age. They were both so young when it started that they did not really understand what was going on. At the very beginning of the book Vahan mentioned “I

I knew that we were taught their language in school; I knew that we went to different churches, but I did not know that we were enemies” (Bagdasarian 9). Loung had a very similar experience at the beginning of her book, First They Killed My Father, where she was asking her dad many questions about what was going on since she did not even know that there was a war at the age of five. Each child had times where they struggled because they were so young during these tough times. Five-year-old, Loung even had trouble in her sleep because of the war she told the reader, “The nights when I do not dream of family, I have nightmares of something or someone trying to kill me” (Ung 140). She is so young that being separated from her family is having some very negative effects and causing her to worry greatly about them and fear that she will be killed in the brutal ways that they were killed. Fictional character Vahan is also very worried in his youth that they will kill him as they killed his father, or his brother, or his grandmother. No one should have to fear this, especially these young children who live with this fear for the rest of their lives. Because of the genocides, both of them lost many friends and family members; this made it so that they had to become more independent than the average child.

Vahan was forced to move many times and find many different places to go as he could not be discovered by the gendarmes. The first time he had to move his mother told Sisak, “‘When it gets dark,’ my mother said to Sisak, ‘I want you and Vahan to run away’” (Bagdasarian 50). All male Armenians in Turkey were constantly at risk of being found and killed, even young boys like Vahan and his brother Sisak. These terrible situations made it so that Vahan had to stay on the move to avoid being caught and killed by the Turkish army. Someone would relate this to Loung as she was also being forced to change her location quite a few times to avoid being caught by the Khmer Rouge as someone who used to live in Phnom Penh. They both have to be separated from family and friends at different times throughout their journey in order to protect themselves and their families. Loung’s mother told her children, “‘If we stay together, we die together,’ she says quietly, ‘but if they cannot find us, they cannot kill us’” (Ung 121). This is the moment when Loung's mother told her that she and her siblings that they had to all split up so that if one of them had gotten caught they would have had no way to find the other ones. Sadly, since the majority of his family had already been found in the beginning, he did not quite have the problem of having his family found out,