I am French Armenian and I am 15 years old. My mother is French
Armenian and my father is French. I see my mother's parents very
often and I know their parents’ story about the genocide.
My mother never met any of her grandparents, they died long before
she was born. But she recorded her parents while they told their
story of the genocide and wrote it down for the family, and for this
story to outlive them.
We don't know a lot about her mother's parents: we only know they
were deported from Anatolia to a desert in Syria, maybe Deir-Ez-Zor,
and then they met in Aleppo. We know a lot more about her father's
parents.
My grandfather's father was from Lice, in Dikranakert. He was 11
years old during the genocide, he had 2 siblings and was the youngest
one. He told his story again and again to my grandfather when he was
a kid. He lived in a village composed of Armenian and Kurdish people,
there weren't any Turks. The Turkish army arrived in their village
during spring, in 1915. They asked at first for the Armenian
intellectuals, teachers, clergy, to come to a meeting outside the
village, they asked this for 2 or 3 evenings in a row. And one
evening, the men didn't come back.
After that evening, they asked all the Armenian men to come to the
meetings, and they didn't come back. Then they chased every Armenian
in the village. When the army and the Kurds arrived for his family,
the Turks took his sister with them before leaving the others to the
Kurds with the order to kill them. My great grandfather's parents
begged the Kurds to leave their 2 other sons alive, and the Kurds let
the 2 kids escape.
My great grandfather lived hidden outside in the nature for something
like a month or two (he didn't know exactly for how long) until the
Armenians were not systematically killed but rather forced to work.
During this time he barely ate because he only ate what he found in
nature (often only roots and mosses). He was very careful with water
because he knew a lot of survivors were killed when they tried to
reach a natural fountain, so he only drank trickles of water on the
floor.
After this time he worked for a Kurdish family (for free of course)
and so did his brother. His brother was killed by some Kurds a couple
months later. He tried to find his sister many years later but he
never found any trace of her.
As for my great grandmother, her whole family was killed in front of
her, her parents and her 6 siblings. She was less than 10 years old.
My great grandfather used to show my grandfather the house that was
theirs before the genocide when they walked past it, several times
per week. It had been stolen by a Kurdish family.
My history is very important to me, I know how important it is to
keep Armenian culture alive. We owe it to our ancestors. I am now
learning to speak Armenian with AGBU AVC language lessons and I want
to thank AGBU for these lessons.
My passion is music, I play electric guitar and drums and I decided
to write a song about the Armenian genocide and the current situation
in Artsakh, with some of the chorus lyrics in Armenian.
