Commemorative Children's Practices of the Armenian Genocide in the Turkey During the First World War

The article examines the conditions of the formation of commemorative children's practice concerning the period of the Armenian Genocide in Turkey. The relevance of the subject is determined by the fact that its study allows us to better understand the mechanism of the emergence of such practices, aimed simultaneously at the presentation of the past and its evaluative representation in the present. The ambiguity of children's collective memory is shown. On the one hand, the Armenian Genocide became a meta – narrative of traumatic memory, based on the ethnized messages "Armenian – victim", "Turk – murderer", on the other – the children – participants of those terrible events-provided the heroization of the image of the survivors. Therefore, special attention is paid to the practices of child survival to prove that children cannot be considered only victims, they were active creators of their lives – "selfsaved". The author comes to the conclusion that the memory of children about the genocide recorded passive and active forms of survival, and commemorative children's practices are constructed in the process of interpersonal interaction both with the help of empathically conditioned mechanisms of affective identification with Others, compassion and empathy for them, and through personal reflection of responsibility to oneself and Others.