My great grandmother’s name was Hosrovaduht, an old Armenian name which roughly translates to “good daughter”. She comes from an ordinary family in Nakhchivan and her parents Annush and Hambarzom were farmers. In 1918, the year in which it all happened, she was 13 years old and had and older sister and two younger siblings. Her older sister was already married and had three children, one of which was just six months old.
It was an ordinary day and my great grandmother and her mother were baking traditional flatbread (lavash) when someone ran to the farm to warn them. They first laughed at him because they thought it was a prank. The messenger told them ‘The Turkish soldiers and the local Turkish populace are marching to your farm and you’re just sitting here baking bread’. The father then took a bag, filled it with bread and gave them “a kilo of gold” (that’s how my great grandmother would put it) and sent his wife and children away. He told them he’d catch up to them after he’d locked the doors and secured the kitchen. They would never see him again. He was killed and the family’s cows were stolen.
They walked with four adults (the mother, the sister and a some neighbours) and six children towards Goris, a city in Western Armenia. They only moved during the night and hid behind rocks or in bushes during the day in order not to get caught. At some point they ran out of water and bread but Turkish people who were well aware of what was going on helped them out by giving them food. Exhausted and hungry, they kept on walking, ignoring the countless corpses they saw on their way. The neighbours in the group advised the older sister to leave her infant behind because they were afraid the child would put them in danger if it cried and gave them way but she would not hear of it. Eventually, the youngest one would be the only one to survive, because the other two would later die in World War 2.
They eventually reached Armenia where other people helped them out by feeding them, giving them clothes and they finally had a place to stay. Annush, my great great grandmother, however, soon became ill and passed away. The older sister now had to take care of six children: three of her own and her three siblings. Being unable to provide, she had no choice but to send my great grandmother and her younger sister to an orphanage founded by Americans. The long-term solution of these orphanages was to send the Armenian children to America, where they had a better chance to lead a better life. However, once again the older sister refused to have the children sent away and was able to take back in my great grandmother and her sister seven years later, when they were 21 and 17 years old.
In 1928, my great grandmother married my great grandfather, whom she’d met in the orphanage and who also was a survivor of the genocide. They worked hard to build a home for themselves and went from having nothing to leading a somewhat comfortable life. However, life was never really good to my great grandmother as 4 of the 7 children she gave birth to eventually died. Her brother also died in the Second world war. Her sister, even though she married and had children, eventually lost her mind and was put in a mental institution, where she stayed until she died.
I don’t know much about her other children but my grandmother grew up to be a chemist and married my grandfather, a gynaecologist. My grandfather passed away three weeks ago, he was a good man. In 1990, my grandmother visited her ancestral home in Nakhchivan where many Armenians who survived the genocide had returned during the Soviet years. The area now belongs to Azerbaijan and after the Armenian-Azerbaijani war, Armenians are no longer allowed to enter the territory.