Transcript
Joe Dunthorne (0:01)
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Belent Bilmez (0:06)
I will be honest with you because nowadays in this world, everything, every shock, every trauma, you know, the so called shocks and trauma lasts one week, one month, and then it's over. I don't want to turn this meeting into a very dramatic thing and I don't know actually what you think about it, like sometimes you do hesitate to tell, tell people who you are, what role your grandparents could have been. Because don't forget, we are talking about chemical weapons, we are talking about crime against humanity, we are talking about killing of people by a state that was helped by maybe your grandfather. In that sense, I wonder how you feel and what you think after all of this.
Joe Dunthorne (0:56)
It's, I mean, I feel you've got to the, you got to the point really accurately. I was, I was. And still, you know, remain, I guess, a little scared to kind of openly talk about it because it feels, you know, how do I, how do I come to terms with that? I can't come to terms with that. That's really difficult. I'm Joe Dunthorne and you're listening to Half Life Episode 8 A Fracture. It was a Saturday morning in the spring of 2025, more than five years since I started looking into my family history. And I admit I was ready for a change. I didn't want to spend another minute reading about, for example, secondary infections in mustard gas blisters. At home in London, I was conducting one of my final interviews with a history professor I'd first met in Istanbul, Belent Bilmez. I mainly just wanted to ask him for clarity on a few points, fact check and tidy up so that I could finally put away my piles of documents.
Belent Bilmez (2:30)
And when you said, now, like, about that, it was heavy. On the one hand you said, but then you didn't want to think so much about it. It sounded like a defense mechanism, you know, like maybe you cannot come to terms with it or not in that way.
Joe Dunthorne (2:44)
He was right. But the sort of avoidance I'd been engaging in wasn't an option for everyone.
Belent Bilmez (2:51)
I was born into it. I mean, my generation was born into these stories in this trauma. It was everywhere. As a child, when you walk around, they tell you, oh, you asked for a place. It's after that place where that massacre took place. Or you pass by, they say, oh, there are still bones of people there. It was in everyday life, you know, like you grew up with it. And then I cannot deny that my relatives, my grandparents were killed for nothing, just for being from their sim or their ethnic or religious Background. And then of course, you think everybody knows it. And it's a kind of, in a sick way, in an unhealthy way, it's normal that it is there. I call it obsessed, but obsessed engagement with that, you know, like you are so much in it, you are almost too much in it. It's a trauma. You are too much in it. And the other world is too much out outside of it, based on denial, silence, extreme silence and denial.