Prior to the first world war, the Greeks of Edremit, including my parents and their brothers and sisters, fled the pogrom. They made it to the ocean, but not before my father endured a critical experience in his life and received the last rites as they waited for the boats to arrive.
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Prior to the first world war, the Greeks of Edremit, including my parents and their brothers and sisters, fled the pogrom.

They made it to the ocean, but not before my father endured a critical experience in his life and received the last rites as they waited for the boats to arrive.

These events and the one in 1923 in Smyrna, that included the butchering, the raping and the torturing of Greeks, have made me deeply aware of the Turkish government's efforts to reinterpret and distort history.

A recent article by Taner Akçam, a professor of history at Clark University and the author of The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire, is particularly compelling.

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