Database of Eyewitness Testimony

[Yavrum]

Check out this map

Check out this map:

http://armenianhouse.org/bliss/turkey/turkey-map.jpg

I believe it's Eastern Turkey (no?), there is a place called SALT PLAIN - it's just south of Angora. The military sent my grandfather there to serve in the army. I wonder why the military would send my grandfather there. That sure doesn't look like the front lines during any war, does it?

ALSO - On the same map, south of Aleppo in the Syrian desert is another plain of sort called "Hauran" which I believe is the place my grandmother talks about as "Harran." That would make sense if it took them 4 months to get from Aintab to Hauran. Just north of Hauran on the map there is another place called Hume(?), I can't quite make out the spelling from this map, but perhaps this is the place my grandmother is referring to as Hami. It would all make sense. Hauran, then, is where the bones of my great grandparents and an uncle and an aunt that died as babies and they were all buried together - (except for my great grandmother who no one knows where she was taken but was lost in the same vicinity). Does this make sense?

I don't know why, but for some reason, solving this mystery is like some kind of healing for the departed who died so cruelly.

[imported_Guest]

Check out this map:

http://armenianhouse.org/bliss/turkey/turkey-map.jpg

I believe it's Eastern Turkey (no?), there is a place called SALT PLAIN - it's just south of Angora. The military sent my grandfather there to serve in the army. I wonder why the military would send my grandfather there. That sure doesn't look like the front lines during any war, does it?

In her novel "Farewell Anatolia" (original Greek name of the book is "Matomena Chomata"), Dido Sotiriou tells a true lifestory of Manolis Aksiyotis, an Ottoman Greek of that era. In the story, Manolis is sent to the south of Ankara (Angora) as a member of the labor battalion to construct railway tunnels passing through hills. So, your grandfather may be sent there for the same reason.

ALSO - On the same map, south of Aleppo in the Syrian desert is another plain of sort called "Hauran" which I believe is the place my grandmother talks about as "Harran." That would make sense if it took them 4 months to get from Aintab to Hauran. Just north of Hauran on the map there is another place called Hume(?), I can't quite make out the spelling from this map, but perhaps this is the place my grandmother is referring to as Hami. It would all make sense. Hauran, then, is where the bones of my great grandparents and an uncle and an aunt that died as babies and they were all buried together - (except for my great grandmother who no one knows where she was taken but was lost in the same vicinity). Does this make sense?

I don't know why, but for some reason, solving this mystery is like some kind of healing for the departed who died so cruelly.

"Harran" is a district of Urfa. You can find detailed info from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harran

I have never heard a place named as "Hami". Are you sure that you've got the right name?
If I can help the translation of the tapes, I will do it with pleasure. I know Turkish, but don't know Armenian.

Best Wishes

[Joseph]

http://www.queenscourier.com/articles/2008/04/09/news/local/news36.txt

Survivors remember Armenian genocide

BY JESSICA LYONS

Wednesday, April 9, 2008 7:56 PM EDT

As the 93rd anniversary of the Armenian genocide approaches, the few remaining survivors continue to tell their stories in order to make sure that the world knows what happened and does not soon forget about it.

The anniversary is commemorated on April 24, which marks the date that the Armenian Genocide began in 1915. From 1915 to 1923, 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were killed by Young Turks. An additional 500,000 were exiled.

Survivor Onorik Eminian, now 95 and living at the NY Home for the Armenian Aged in Flushing, was just a little girl playing ball outside when the Turks invaded her home in Izmir. Two Turks entered her family’s home, pulling her hair and slapping her as they asked where her father was. They took Eminian’s father away with them, but the Turks returned to her house.

“They killed my father and they brought his jacket and pants (back), all (covered with) blood,” Eminian said.

Eminian saw her mother and grandmother shot and killed and her baby brother thrown and killed. She was also hit with a rifle butt that she still has scars from.

Eventually, the Red Cross took Eminian in and placed her in an orphanage. She later went to Greece and moved to the United States in 1930.

Born in Palu on December 22, 1909, Perouz Kalousdian was six years old when the war started. One of the first things she said happened was all of the men were taken away and never seen again.

“After that, they took everything away from us,” said Kalousdian, also a resident of the home in Flushing. “I’ll never, never forget.”

Charlotte Kechejian, a 95-year-old survivor who was born in Nikhda, remembers walking through the desert with her mother, feeling tired, thirsty and hungry. Her mother kept promising her that it would only be a little while longer and that in the end she would have comfort and happiness.

“Thank God I had my mother,” said Kechejian, who came to the United States with her mother when she was 10 and is now living at the NY Home for the Armenian Aged. “If I didn’t have my mother, how would I have had courage (at) eight years old?”

Survivor Arsalos Dadir’s father was also killed. Being that her family was wealthy, Dadir, now 94, and her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother were able to find safety with a wealthy Turkish family that they were on good terms with. The family eventually moved to Constantinople, where Dadir married and raised two children, moving to the United States later in life. She now also lives at the home in Flushing.

Armenian genocide expert Dr. Dennis R. Papazian estimates that there are roughly 200 to 300 survivors still living in the United States.

On Sunday, April 27, the Armenian genocide will be commemorated with an event in Times Square at 2 p.m. There will be free bus transportation to and from. In Queens, there will be a bus at Baruyr’s at 40th Street and Queens Boulevard.

For more information, visit www.knightsofvartan.org.

[Joseph]

Survivor told chilling tales about Armenian genocide
By Jim Steinberg / The Fresno Bee
05/21/08 23:28:53
MORE INFORMATION
George Hakalmazian
Born: Birth date unknown, 1907?

Died: May 15, 2008

Occupation: Dry cleaning business owner

Survivors: wife, Mary; daughters, Georgia Sample and Margaret Tejerian

George Hakalmazian was 99 or 100 when he died May 15 in Fresno. His age and birth date were an impenetrable mystery, but not the place of his birth, Peri, Armenia, nor the horrors he witnessed there as a child.
Ninety-three years ago, turmoil and massacres at the hands of Ottoman Turks nearly killed him, and did kill some 1.5 million other Armenians.

His family retells his death-defying experience as one boy's chapter in the sad saga of the Armenian genocide.

Grandson Scott Tejerian recounted the word-of-mouth family history that passes from one generation to the next. As an Armenian boy of 6 or 7, Mr. Hakalmazian escaped Peri, but without certification of his birth. There was no time to retrieve documents.

In an uncanny family coincidence in Fresno, Scott Tejerian's father, Thomas, died Friday of cancer, one day after Mr. Hakalmazian.

Scott's father and his maternal grandfather were not blood relatives, but they were close friends who shared vital history, Scott Tejerian said, because they shared memories of mass slaughter not far from the Yeprat River, better known as the Euphrates.

Mr. Hakalmazian never forgot the brutal and terrifying massacre he witnessed as a small boy.

He talked about it often with his grandson in his still-thick Armenian accent, and Tejerian retells it, keeping alive his grandfather's account of the Armenian genocide:

Mr. Hakalmazian's sister was forced to marry a son of the Turkish mayor of Peri. The sister, whose name Tejerian doesn't know, married the Turk on the promise that these nuptials would guarantee the safety of Mr. Hakalmazian's family. That promise was betrayed, Tejerian said.

His mother and father were taken and killed.

Turkish soldiers took Mr. Hakalmazian and an older brother, Hagop, for slave labor. A third brother, Marderos, already had left Armenia and was living in Chicago.

Soldiers grabbed Mr. Hakalmazian's small nephew, too small for labor, and threw him into the Yeprat to drown. But the nephew, whose name has disappeared in the century since, had often swum the Yeprat.

He stroked easily until, as family history has it, horrified relatives saw soldiers shoot him dead in the water.

That execution haunted Mr. Hakalmazian forever.

"It didn't matter how old he was," Tejerian said. "As he told us that story, he cried."

Mr. Hakalmazian was taken for slave labor for a Turkish farmer and toiled for him for several years. A cousin in his late teens sometimes sneaked into the camp to check on him until the night he finally took Mr. Hakalmazian and several others and shepherded them to an orphanage, Mr. Hakalmazian's daughter, Margaret Tejerian, recalled.

The orphanage arranged for them to get to another orphanage in Lebanon.

In 1923, brother Marderos Hakalmazian sponsored them for immigration to the United States.

In a fitting coincidence, Mr. Hakalmazian entered his new country on Ellis Island under the watchful gaze of the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July, 1923. Mr. Hakalmazian always treasured the timing.

U.S. Customs agents asked the teen for his birth date, which was a mystery to him and his surviving relatives. They didn't know, so they told the agents it was that day, July 4.

"He always loved that," Margaret Tejerian said. "It made him very proud to have the same birth date. ... He was happy be alive and go to school."

Mr. Hakalmazian arrived with no English. Marderos Hakalmazian brought him to Chicago, where he got work in a print shop and learned English. He started first grade as a teenager and graduated from high school at 21.

He worked in a Chicago dry cleaning shop and learned to become a tailor.

Later, he moved to Glendale -- whose large Armenian community welcomed him -- and opened his own dry cleaning store with money he had saved in Chicago.

Scott Tejerian grieved for his father and grandfather this week.

What he said of his father, who served under Gen. George S. Patton in World War II, applied as well to his grandfather: "My dad was a very proud man. He didn't talk about it a lot. He loved the Armenian traditions, but loved being American. He said this was the best place to live."

The reporter can be reached at [email protected] or (559) 441-6311.

[Cthulhu]

Invaluable.

Thank you.

It's strange recognising the names of obcure little places that probably only I has ever been to in recent years, places like "Prkhous" (Phrhus, now called Ovakishla) and "Dspni" (Zipni, now called Varli).

Hey! My mom lives in Varli! Awesome.