BY PAUL CHADERJIAN
A Fire That Never Goes Out
A single ember, unremarkable in its origin, finds its way onto a rooftop—silent, unnoticed—until it catches the wind. It glows for just a moment, then vanishes into the vast emptiness beyond.
But embers do not truly disappear.
They settle, drifting into the air like forgotten thoughts.
I am sitting on my balcony in West Los Angeles, watching the hills to the north. The city lies beneath a heavy sky, but it’s the hills I cannot stop staring at the landscape that still bears the memory of something lost.
The smoke is long gone. The flames that tore through the Palisades have been subdued. Yet, in their wake, they leave a silence more profound than the fire itself.
The Palisades Fire, ignited a day after our people celebrated Christmas, is now contained. Its fury extinguished, but the evidence of its path remains — a landscape of blackened ruins, hollowed-out homes, and memories reduced to ash.
It swallowed 23,448 acres with savage force, turned thousands of homes into fleeting memories, and claimed 12 lives—their stories now written in the dirt beneath the smoldering remains.
The January sky flickered, thick with smoke, thick with loss. In Southern California, fire is not an anomaly; it’s a recurring nightmare, an inheritance of living in a land of extremes.
***
Fleeing Into the Night
Far away from the hills above Brentwood, which lie just miles from my balcony, the Eaton Fire tore through Altadena and Pasadena—14,021 acres erased, 17 more lives stolen.
The toll beyond numbers:
Fathers, daughters, neighbors, lovers—entire lifetimes burned away.
The fires are out, yes.
But their ghosts remain.
I didn’t see the Eaton Fire from my balcony like I saw the flames from Palisades.
Instead, I saw it on my screen in the Fox 11 newsroom—hour after hour, night after night—as the team worked around the clock, without days off, for nearly three weeks.
I wrote about it for the anchors to read.
I edited video from the field.
I wrote about the human losses.
I wrote about the homes reduced to embers.
I wrote about the families who will never return.
I filled out the headlines that appeared in the lower third of the screen and the full screen graphics that measured the immeasurable.
I caught myself using the words “devastation” and “catastrophe” one too many times.
Among the 16,255 structures lost, one stood out:
***
Sahag-Mesrob Armenian Christian School
Where Armenian children once learned their language, their faith, their history—reduced to ash.
A different fire, but the same story.
Another home.
And I sat in the newsroom, my fingers moving faster than my heart, writing stories that had been written before.
Translating fire into words.
Loss into sentences.
Disaster into headlines.
Watching the same tragedy unfold.
Typing the same words over and over.
And somewhere in the chaos of breaking news and final death counts, I thought of Artsakh.
I thought of another fire, one that burned far away but felt intimately close.
***
The Fire That Swallowed Artsakh
That fire that erased Artsakh, the ancestral homeland of Armenians, forcing 120,000 people to flee their homes, their history, their very identity.
That loss struck a deep, raw nerve, reopening wounds long healed over.
Just as 1.5 million Armenians were lost in the Genocide, Artsakh became another chapter in our long history of displacement.
The loss of Artsakh felt like a culmination of personal and national tragedies, a collective trauma that echoed through history.
The land where the Armenian alphabet was born, where ancient monasteries stood as testaments to our faith and culture, was now on fire.
The people of Artsakh, who had fought for their right to self-determination, were forced to abandon their homes, their heritage, their very existence.
Some 48,000 perished in the Artsakh liberation war before its fall.
Fires burned while Russian peacekeepers watched.
***
The Same Fire, The Same Exile
Fires in California.
Fires in Artsakh.
Fires in Gaza.
Fires in history, memory, exile.
The names change, but the story does not.
The same fire, the same consuming force—burning, sweeping through lives, leaving behind only the traces of what once was.
Over the years since my first TV job at Horizon, I have scrolled through millions of images on my screen—the burnt baby held over the flames of a kitchen stove in Sumgait.
The Civil War in Syria.
The Houthis fighting the Yemeni army.
The breakaway paramilitary Rapid Support Forces battling the Sudanese government.
North Koreans sent as disposable soldiers in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The Taliban fighting the world in Afghanistan.
Islamist rebellions in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Chad.
Ethiopian government and Tigray People’s Liberation Front at war with each other.
Myanmar’s ruling military junta and its country’s People’s Defense Forces and ethnic militia at odds with them.
Families wailing over shrouded bodies and pointing to destroyed homes— are all the same.
Their faces are grief-stricken, their eyes vacant, staring into a future that will never be the same.
Behind them, what was once home is now nothing more than a blackened husk, its walls turned to cinders.
***
A Fire Burning Through History
I have seen these faces before.
In black-and-white photographs from Sepastia and Erzurum, where the fire of genocide had already come, decades before these flames.
In color photos of my parents in Beirut, refugees, displaced, still carrying the weight of their own losses.
In the grainy home video footage of Artsakh, where the fire had never fully left—a lingering ember that would not go out.
The stories do not change.
Only the years.
Only the places.
Yesterday, there was a house.
Today, there is nothing.
Yesterday, there was a Second Armenian Republic.
Today, there is exile.
The green hills north of Brentwood burn, and I think of Artsakh.
The thick, ancient trees—tall like sentinels, their roots tangled deep in the soil, their branches reaching skyward—until the moment the bombs came.
The phosphorus fell into the Black Garden, Karabakh, Artsakh—the original Armenian name for the region is Արցախ, dating back to antiquity as one of the 15 provinces of the ancient Kingdom of Armenia.
The skies turned red—thick with blood, thick with fire.
The air reeked of loss.
The fire took everything.
1,700 square miles of Artsakh—gone.
Hundreds of thousands of acres of historic Armenia—stolen.
Blood spilled across the land.
***
A Homeland Turned to Dust
They call it Karabakh, the Black Garden.
But before it was Karabakh, it was Artsakh—one of the 15 provinces of ancient Armenia, a land older than the names forced upon it.
1,700 square miles of Artsakh—gone.
Hundreds of thousands of acres of historic Armenia—stolen.
The phosphorus fell. The skies turned red—thick with blood, thick with fire.
The Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones descended like locusts, hunting, circling, dropping death.
Men burned where they stood.
Soldiers, whose bodies had been melted by white phosphorus.
Soldiers, whose lungs were scarred from inhaling fire.
Soldiers, whose skin peeled off, their last moments spent breathing in their own burning flesh.
The hills of California glow red, and I see the villages of Artsakh, torched, abandoned, turned to dust in the wake of forced surrender.
The Santa Ana winds howl through these canyons, and I hear the voices of my grandparents, whispering the stories of Sepastia and Erzurum.
And I hear my father, my mother, my sisters, too.
We lost our home in Antelias, a suburb of Beirut, and residence of Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia.
The ‘civil war’ began.
School shuttered. The power went out.
Arab brothers turned against one another.
The bombs fell, the city burned.
We packed what we could, handed the keys to a family who had lost their home, thinking we would return when the fighting was over.
***
The War Crime, The Exile Followed
The war came, Arab brothers turned against one another,
Extremely low-flying Israeli jets shook our homes, destroying the abundance that the Paris of the Middle East had once enjoyed—a place that united religions and sects in one parliament, a global destination, the gateway to the Arab world, the air and seaports to the Middle East.
We packed what we could, handed the keys to a family who had lost their home and rented ours, walked out the door, thinking we would come back when the fighting was over.
The fighting never stopped.
The nation’s statehood collapsed, its centers of business and transportation hubs moved to the newly created cities in the Gulf.
Another fire.
Another exile.
My family also walked away, drove to Syria–-the land Mark Anthony gave as a wedding present to Cleopatra. Their story would live in history books while our and so many others would get ghosted until this news writer put it into words and sends it to editor Ara Khachatourian for consideration and generous column inches in this historic newspaper.
***
A Printing Press Silence
And I think of my father’s publishing house on Mono Street Saht in the Al-Dabass (صحّة الدبّاس) neighborhood in Beirut, Lebanon.
The giant, basement-level presses once hummed, printing books in Western Armenian—books that would now never be read.
Books that sat in stacks of boxes in warehouses, and in our final family home in Fresno, waiting for hands that would never turn their pages.
The words, the language, the history, all locked away in a dark room, forgotten, collecting dust.
Another kind of loss.
Another kind of fire.
***
A Homeland Built and Lost, Again. Doing My Part–Building Before the Fall
I did what I could to build something new.
I went to Artsakh to report on the roads, the schools, the homes we built from nothing.
I stood in the dirt and felt something I had never felt before—a homeland not in exile, not theoretical, but real.
I gave what I could.
My voice. My words.
I went to Artsakh year after year.
I reported on the roads we paved, the homes we built, the schools we opened.
I walked the halls of the hospitals funded by donations, where the sick—who had been forgotten by the world—found healing.
I watched as doctors, flown in from Yerevan and Glendale, set up temporary clinics in remote villages, where families who had never seen a physician received checkups, medications, basic care.
I spoke to the mothers who brought their children to these missions, waiting in lines that stretched outside village halls, hoping for antibiotics, vitamins, a diagnosis, a cure.
I saw the relief in their eyes when they were handed medicine, a bandage, a promise that they had not been abandoned.
***
The Telethon—A Global Mission
Every Thanksgiving, I stood next to Alina Dorian, Salpi Ghazarian, and Artak Herikian, then Tatevik Ekezian, Arsinee Khanjian, Mark Geragos, Maria Mehranian, and Araksya Karapetyan, under studio lights on Hollywood soundstages, speaking from the heart, asking the world to give whatever they could.
I hosted group after group of schoolchildren, who came in with their prepared scripts to tell the audience why they had held bake sales.
I heard the names of my parents’ friends, forgoing vacations, skipping home renovations, writing checks so families in Artsakh could have homes of their own.
I stood next to the young volunteers on the phone banks and took calls year after year from family, relatives, and friends, many from Fresno, who wanted to tell me their donation amount in person.
With executive producer Mike Levin at the helm, I introduced Antranik Baghdassarian, who took his earnings from cheese and dairy products to match every donation, writing million-dollar checks so that Artsakh would rise again.
I talked to Hacop and Hilda Baghdassarian, who, along with their sons, built community centers and schools.
Their hard earnings came from managing the Massis chain of kebab eateries, but instead of vacation homes or luxury trips, they invested in classrooms in villages where children had once learned by candlelight.
Their giving was not charity; it was an act of love, of defiance, of permanence.
Hacop’s personal gift to me was telling me, “You’re the համ ու հոտ of the Telethon.” He was saying “You are the essence of the Telethon. You bring the soul, the heart, the defining energy to the Telethon.”
***
The Road to Talish—The Last Defenders
We believed.
We raised millions.
We rebuilt.
We thought we had outrun the fire that was to come.
We built hospitals, cultural centers, highways that cut through mountains to connect our scattered villages.
Backstage, we shared Zhingyalov hats, the traditional Armenian flatbread stuffed with a medley of 31 different greens—a taste of home amidst the studio’s sterile lights.
I went along with one of the medical missions funded by the telethon, accompanying doctors from California’s Adventist Health Glendale, led by Dr. George Mutafyan.
In Stepanakert, the selfless doctors forgoing vacations performed brain and knee surgeries.
In Tavush, they helped farmers, treated people for cholesterol and high blood pressure, and gave them medications villagers couldn’t afford.
In Noyemberyan, we met Grisha Khachigian, a man who worked with his hands until he couldn’t.
“The pain was so bad that I couldn’t do physical work. I had a business and an orchard to run and worked in construction. But everything came to a grinding halt.”
“I couldn’t move. And then the doctors came.”
He spoke of them as if they were angels.
***
The Soldier who Never Left
In 2019, I met Leova, a soldier who stayed in Talish after the 2016 war, when everyone else had left.
His village was abandoned—his home, his school, his neighbors gone—but he refused to leave.
His neighbors didn’t leave by choice.
They left because snipers took shots at them as they tried to live in peace.
They left because the enemy wouldn’t let them plant, wouldn’t let them farm, wouldn’t let them walk outside without fear of being killed.
But Leova stayed.
His village was abandoned—new houses built by the telethon left unoccupied—but he refused to leave.
I remember the road he led us down, roads built by the generosity of Antranik ‘Anto’ Baghdassarian.
Leova took us deep into the forests above Talish, through tall grass and stone paths, leading to a 5th-century monastery and the castles of the Armenian Meliks, noble rulers who governed small, semi-autonomous regions in historical Armenia from the12th to 18th centuries.
There, among the ruins, he showed us the graves of his children.
A 12-year-old daughter, Ani, who died because there was no way to get her to a hospital.
A 3-month-old son, Hayk, lost to a medical mistake in a candlelit room during the war.
He did not cry.
He did not blame.
He just stood there, strong as the mountains, telling us, “I will never leave. I will never give up my home.”
As the Palisades, Eaton, Hurst, Kenneth, and Hughes fires burned, I wondered if Leova had stayed behind during the exodus, if he had fought to his death or if he was in a prison cell in Baku right now, along with philanthropist Ruben Vardanyan, who donated a million dollars to the telethon.
Mr. Vardanyan, the last State Minister of Artsakh, is withering in jail after his arrest by Azerbaijan on September 27, 2023, as he attempted to cross back into Armenia.
He has been absurdly and wrongly charged with financing terrorism, creating and participating in illegal armed groups, and illegally crossing Azerbaijan’s border.
And I thought of Monte Melkonian, who once left the safety of the West to fight for Armenians in Lebanon and Artsakh.
They called him a dreamer.
An idealist with a rifle.
A man who did not believe in exile.
***
Involuntary Silence and Forced Complicity
And then there was another kind of erasure.
The kind that happened not with bombs or phosphorus, but with silence.
I sat in many international newsrooms, watching, waiting, pitching stories about the blockade of Artsakh. Day after day, I asked, pushed, fought for coverage.
But no one wanted it. They wouldn’t allow it.
Not yet. Not until it was too late.
Not until the people of Artsakh were already gone.
I worked in many newsrooms where we weren’t worth 15 seconds on the evening news. In one newsroom, a news coordinator told me he had heard of Armenians. His Turkish wife had once told him,
“Watch out for Armenians. They’re cheats, con artists and swindlers. They’re troublemakers.”
And that is how he saw me: the Armenian hustler, shyster, the fast-talking charlatan, a crook, a weasel – not an honorable man disciplined by two honorable parents to serve, give the shirt off my back and take a bullet for others.
Some fires never die; they keep burning for centuries in those whose ancestors in their ancestral homeland had brain-washed them in the new world, in Amerika. Hatred passed through whispers of generations, ancestral imprints, and DNA of memory, like this missive to my people at 2:32 A.M. on the first of February.
And then, in October 2023, the war in Gaza began.
I watched the raw videotapes of burnt babies, toddlers shaking in pain, unable to create a sound from the agony they were enduring—because there were no painkillers left, no food, no water.
Their homes were gone, their parents decapitated in front of them, and they were taken by strangers to cold hospital rooms—where they lay in pain, their bones cut, their limbs amputated without anesthetics, without pain medication.
I had written about genocide my entire career.
I had written about Artsakh, about the families driven from their homes, about how the world refused to acknowledge the reality of their suffering.
I had written about our people, who had fought for over 110 years to say, “Never again.”
And there it was.
Happening again.
In Artsakh. In Gaza. In Sudan. In Myanmar. In Ethiopia. In Ukraine.
It was happening everywhere, including to my own people.
***
The Lie of Never Again
The world had watched 1.5 million Armenians murdered in 1915 and said never again.
An Azeri smirked at me while her government rewrote our history, trying to tell the world we were not Armenians but Albanian Christians—that we had stolen Azeri heritage, music, language, dances, and food.
The world had watched the Holocaust unfold and said never again.
The world had watched Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, and said never again.
But never again was a lie.
And my stomach turned.
Because I had seen this before.
Because silence is another form of complicity.
Because the liberal newsrooms that prided themselves on covering the oppressed had decided that we—the dispossessed Armenians, the starving children of the Genocide, of Stepanakert—were not worthy of 15 seconds on the evening news.
And I found myself writing death tolls, again and again, as the numbers climbed past 10,000, then 20,000, then 47,000 Palestinians. I wrote about the children buried under rubble, the hospitals bombed, the civilians massacred.
I wrote until my hands ached and my rotator cuff tore.
I wrote until I couldn’t breathe.
I wrote about people I would never meet, in places I would never go, and I grieved for them, as if they were my own.
Because, in a way, they were.
***
The Day it all Fell Apart
And then, we lost it all.
120,000 people forced out.
They left keys in their doors, just like we did.
The images of fleeing families, thousands of cars lined up trying to leave on the ‘lifeline highway’ the Armenian Diaspora built, their faces etched with despair, mirrored the scenes from my grandparents’ and parents’ experiences.
The same fear, the same desperation, the same sense of loss.
The fire of displacement had returned, consuming yet another piece of our history.
The loss of Artsakh felt deeply personal.
For decades, we had poured our hearts and souls into building a homeland, a place where Armenians could finally feel safe and secure.
I hosted the telethons, my parents, my sisters and their families donated.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were raised, and we built highways, schools, hospitals, cultural centers, homes.
I traveled to Artsakh in 2019 to document these achievements for the annual report, the “Blue Book,” a testament to our collective effort.
And now, it was all gone—taken by a brutal regime that used phosphorus and suicide drones to drive us from our ancient homeland.
They even stole our cuisine, our music, claiming our heritage as their own.
***
And on That Same Day, I Los My Sister, Maral
She fought like the Artsakh people fought—for every breath, for every moment.
She fought to breathe after pulmonary hypertension wouldn’t let her continue her life.
She passed on the day Artsakh fell.
A lung transplant offered hope, the Russians had offered us hope, but the world, it seemed, had other plans.
Her immune system, like a wildfire consuming the landscape, turned against her—taking her life, taking our family’s dreams, her children’s dreams, and my breath away.
***
A Song for Grief, A Testament to Memory
In the depths of grief, I found solace in the haunting melody of Nune Yesayan’s song, “Hangist Togheq Indz Aysor” (“Leave Me Alone Today”).
The poignant lyrics captured the collective weariness, the longing for peace, the pain of relentless loss.
This song, with its yearning for solitude, memory, and escape, mirrors the emotional core of this essay—Relic of Ash, Blood, and Exile.
Both the lyrics and these words explore the weight of the past, the desire for quiet reflection, and the inescapable pull of longing for something lost.f longing for something lost.
***
A Legacy of Language and Resistance
We honor the memories of those we’ve lost, the homes we’ve left behind, the dreams that have been shattered.
We are a people forged in the fires of adversity; our resilience tempered by generations of loss.
From its ashes, we will lay the first stones of renewal, turning loss into legacy.
Long before these trials, Sahak Partev and Mesrop Mashtots gave us the gift of language, ensuring that even in exile, even in ruin, our voices would not fade.
In the 5th century, they brought the Armenian alphabet to Artsakh, founding one of the first Armenian schools at Amaras Monastery and embedding our identity into the very stones of the land.
Their work became our sanctuary, shield against erasure, and vessel of memory.
And so, we will begin again—with Sahag Mesrob Armenian School, lost in the Eaton Fire, but never in spirit.
Named after the men who safeguarded our language and history, it will rise once more, just as our people always have.
From its ashes, we will lay the first stones of renewal, turning loss into legacy.
And as I gaze at the flickering flames on the distant hills, I know that the fire will come again.
But we will be ready.
We will rebuild, as we have always done.
We will remember, as we must always do.
And we will carry the relic of ash, the memory of our losses, as a testament to our enduring
spirit.
***
The Fire Always Comes Back
If some fires never truly go out—if they always come back;
Then, they do not just destroy. They clear. They reset. They make way for something new.
In the spring, the hills will be green again.
Shoots will push through the scorched soil.
The stars will hang over our ruins, waiting.
The wind will whisper in a language older than memory.
And we rebuild.
We honor the memories of those we’ve lost, the homes we’ve left behind, the dreams that have been shattered.
We are a people forged in the fires of adversity; our resilience tempered by generations of loss.
From its ashes, we will lay the first stones of renewal, turning loss into legacy.
We know that the fire will come again.
But we will be ready.
We will rebuild, as we have always done.
We will remember, as we must always do.
We will carry the relic of ash, the memory of our losses, as a testament to our enduring spirit.
Because the fire always comes back.
And so do we.
Paul Chaderjian is a journalist, author, and storyteller with over 35 years of experience in breaking news, content production, and newsroom management. He has worked in influential newsrooms, including American networks and international news channels, covering major global events. He also teaches journalism in the Cal State University system.
As a writer, Paul explores themes of identity, displacement, and the Armenian diaspora. His novel, ‘Letters to Barbra,’ delves into memory, trauma, and resilience, resonating with readers worldwide. Blending personal and universal narratives, he continues to craft compelling stories that inform, inspire, and connect audiences.
Paul may be reached via social media platforms @pchadNEWS
