Home › Forums › Everything Else › Requiescant in Pacem › Reply To: Requiescant in Pacem
thank you LA Robert
yes over 1.5 million armenians died in the genocide being raped killed and deported by the Ottomon turks. all because we were Christians.
here are some survivor stories:
He saw the men in his village of Khoolu rounded up and marched off; they would never return. Hidden in the home of a sympathetic Turkish neighbor, he saw Kurdish tribesmen descend on the Armenian women and children who remained behind in Khoolu. The Kurds who had guns used them; those without guns used their quick, scythelike knives. After a time, after the last cry was stilled, Khoolu lay silent.
Then came the waiting. Weeks passed before the government soldiers arrived. A Turkish soldier prodded Mesrop into a caravan of Armenian women and children, and he did not resist. Those in line, perhaps 500 in all, had survived the massacres in the surrounding villages. Mesrop noticed there was not a man among them.
For 15 days, the caravan of exiles snaked slowly across the desert. The march was long and hard, but Mesrop kept pace he did not dare fall behind in the killing heat, as some of the others had. The soldiers, too, frightened Mesrop. Each day they would carry young women from the caravan into the fields; after a time, Mesrop would hear gunfire and then see the soldiers returning, alone.
Now, as the caravan wound its way through the gates of Mardin, the familiar knot of hunger and fear twisted in the boy’s stomach. A soldier plucked him and a handful of other children from the line and led them from house to house.
At one door, a well-to-do Syrian family showed some interest in one of the boys. Soldier and family haggled, while Mesrop watched in silence. Finally, a deal was struck.
“I remember,” he says. “They gave one silver coin for me.”
It was a fall day in 1915. Mesrop Boyajian spent the next 10 years in slavery.
Now 80 and living quietly at Golden Pond, a retirement community in Rancho Cordova, Boyajian is one of 14 Sacramento-area residents who survived the massacres of his people.
The carnage during 1915-18 on the high plains of what is now eastern Turkey left between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians dead and more than half a million banished from the land of their ancestors.