Turkification of Armenian Orphans (Video)

“‘Rescued and Safe:’ Armenian Orphans and the Experience of Genocide”

The decision taken by the Young Turk authorities in the spring of 1915 to expel the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire set into motion a state-sponsored plan that not only resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians. It completely eradicated the Armenian community from Anatolia.The seemingly endless columns of Armenian women and children, elderly Armenians, and weak oneswere deported to Syria. Along the way they were attacked by marauding Muslim bands, tribes, andvillagers as well as the

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(Special Organization), which had been formed specifically toexterminate them. The gendarmes assigned to escort the deported Armenians did little in the way of preventing the attacks. In many cases they took part in the mass killings, rapes, and abductions.Children were perhaps

the most vulnerable of the Armenian deportees. Their parents andother family members had either been killed or succumbed to the horrendous conditions inflictedupon the deportees. Children were forcibly separated from their parents, young women andchildren were

kidnapped, sold, delivered to brothels or adopted into Muslim families. The trauma of these children did not lessen after they were torn from their families. They were often abused and madeto perform strenuous tasks by the families that had taken them in. The forced integration of thesechildren into Muslim households repressed or subsumed their Armenian identity within the dominantcultural and religious milieu. Those children who were orphaned at an especially early age would laterbe unable to recall any memories from their previous lives.

This essay aims to introduce its readers tothe plight of the Armenian orphans and touch, very briefly, upon the international rescue movementthat was born in the midst of the Genocide.Although circumstances differed from case to case, the similarities of the orphans’ experiencesduring the war are striking. In order to gain a better understanding of the ordeals they underwent onecan turn to a variety of sources. One source is the oral testimonies of the survivors, collected largelydecades after the Genocide. In one such collection, we can read stories like Anaguel’s. She was seven oreight in 1915 and her family was killed on the deportation route from her native Mezre. Left alone shehad to beg for food, and survived because of the generosity of several Turks she encountered along her

1- For studies on orphans during the genocide, see especially Keith David Watenpaugh, “The League of Nations’Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920-1927,”

 AmericanHistorical Review

115 (December 2010): 1315-39; Ara Sarafian, “The Absorption of Armenian Women and Childreninto Muslim Households as a Structural Component of the Armenian Genocide,” in

In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century

, eds. Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (New York: Berghan, 2001), 209-21.