Gagrule.net

Gagrule.net News, Views, Interviews worldwide

  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • GagruleLive
  • Armenia profile

Canada, Remembering Knar Yemenidjian, survivor of the Armenian genocide

February 20, 2017 By administrator

Knar-yemenidjianM.J. STONE,

(the globeandmail) She was one of Canada’s last living links to an atrocity that occurred more than 100 years ago. Although Knar Yemenidjian, who died on Jan. 19, reached the age of 107, her childhood was marred by unfathomable violence that nearly ended her life.

“We’re all grieving with the family,” Armen Yeganian, Armenia’s ambassador to Canada, commented after Ms. Yemenidjian’s death. “But she was also a bigger symbol, I would imagine, for the Canadian Armenian community and for Armenian people in general.”

She was born Knar Bohjelian on Feb. 14, 1909, in Caesarea, a city in central Turkey now known as Kayseri. Less than a year earlier, a group of Turkish reformers known as the Young Turks overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid and established a constitutional government. Although the Armenian population of Turkey was initially optimistic about the new regime, they were caught off guard by the xenophobia of the Young Turks and their targeted hatred aimed at Christians and non-Turks who they believed were a threat to the Islamic, “pure Turkish” state they envisioned.

When the Young Turks began their campaign of mass murder on April 24, 1915, the first order of action was arresting and executing several hundred Armenian intellectuals. After that, other Armenians were either systematically slaughtered by marauding killing squads or forced on death marches across the Mesopotamian desert without food or water.

Six-year-old Knar and her family survived the first wave of violence by seeking sanctuary in a barn. Ms. Yeminidjian’s niece Nazar Artinian told CTV News that the family survived only because Knar’s father had been warned by a Turkish friend that “all the Armenians were going to be killed.”

According to Ms. Artinian, the family friend insisted, “if you want to live, leave your house, take your family and go to this farm and hide yourselves there.” So the family hid among the livestock. They were besieged by typhoid and had barely enough food to sustain themselves, but they survived.

When the violence subsided, Knar and her family returned to find many of their neighbours murdered, and all the Armenian homes – including theirs – burned to the ground.

The family’s only hope for continued survival was converting to Islam. So, after they left the barn they adopted Turkish names and Muslim identities. Ms. Artinian said that a great aunt convinced them that it was their only salvation. “It is better to change your religion and live longer than remain Christians and die.” So they rebuilt the family home and lived under Muslim identities in Caesarea for 10 years.

Despite their conversion, the family lived in constant fear. In an interview with historian Lalai Manjikian in 2015, Ms. Yemenidjian confided that while growing up, she remembered how her mother would wrap a scarf around her brother’s head, “so that he might pass for a girl, given that all the men were being rounded up or killed.”

Joseph Yemenidjian, Ms. Yemenidjian’s son, told The Globe and Mail about an incident that long haunted his mother: “A half-dozen years after the genocide first started, my mother was walking with her aunt, who was only a few years older than her, down a street in Caesarea.” When they turned a corner they happened upon soldiers who were dragging the body of a dead man by his feet. “He was a victim of the government-sanctioned violence. When my mother’s aunt, who was already suffering from jaundice, witnessed the scene, she collapsed with terror. She never recovered, dying just a few days after the incident.”

As the genocide continued, Knar got older and began attracting potential suitors, Joseph said. During the family’s remaining years in Turkey, however, her father refused all requests for her hand. “My grandfather was desperate to leave Turkey,” he said, “and he had no intention of leaving his daughter to fend for herself in such a place.”

Once a ceasefire was established, the family fled the region. They travelled to Ankara in 1928, then Istanbul. Eleven months later, they headed to Greece by boat before immigrating to Alexandria, Egypt.

Even after they settled into their new home, Knar’s father continued to reject the suitors who pressed for his permission to marry her. Joseph said that his grandfather insisted that she marry into a respectable family. In the end, his prudence paid off. “My mother was 34 when she finally met my father, who had a family member who was already connected to my mother’s family via marriage.” Once the family patriarch deemed Jean Yemenidjian acceptable, the couple married in 1943.

Joseph explained that his father believed that meeting Knar was fate. “He was already 41 and a goldsmith whose extended family was left destitute following the genocide. The welfare of his family fell upon his shoulders.” Joseph noted that his father worked around the clock and had confessed that until Knar stole his heart, he had given up on romance.

“I never heard either of my parents utter a negative word about the other. It was just the opposite, in fact.” Joseph said that his father’s love for his wife and children inspired him to bless others with a singular wish. “I hope that you are lucky enough to find yourself with a family just like mine.”

The couple lived happily in Egypt until 1956, when the Armenian community in Egypt once again found itself the scapegoat as a result of the Suez Canal crisis.

Arab nationalism swept the country, inciting rage and intimidation that was directed at Armenians. As a consequence, Ms. Yemenidjian’s two sons, Joseph and Noubar, left for Canada and settled in Montreal.

While paying a visit to Montreal during Expo 67, Ms. Yemenidjian was wooed by the city’s charms, and the couple settled there permanently in 1971.

A few years ago, she required the type of assistance that only a nursing home could provide, Joseph said. “When she moved in, and we met the medical staff, they inquired about the medications she was taking. They couldn’t believe that a person might reach the age of 106 without prescription medication.”

Ms. Yemenidjian’s son said that his mother had a wonderful, self-effacing sense of humour. He noted that, although she spoke very little English or French, the other residents surprised him one day, when they remarked to him how funny his mother was. “We can’t understand her and she can’t understand us, they told him, but does she ever make us laugh!”

In 2004, Canada was among the first countries to officially recognize the genocide.

At the age of 106, Ms. Yemenidjian was among a handful of Armenian-Canadians who attended a special ceremony on Parliament Hill in 2015 to mark the centennial of the start of the genocide.

To this day, despite widespread agreement among historians, the Turkish government denies that an Armenian genocide occurred. Since 2003, Turkish teachers have been forbidden to use the term “genocide” in the classroom.

Last year, the country recalled its ambassador from Germany after the German parliament voted to recognize the genocide.

Historians conclude that approximately 1.5 million Armenians were killed during the genocide, but Turkey says the death toll has been exaggerated and considers those who were killed as casualties of a civil war.

Knar Yemenidjian leaves her two sons, Joseph and Noubar, three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/remembering-knar-yemenidjian-survivor-of-the-armenian-genocide/article34087049/

Filed Under: Articles, Genocide Tagged With: armenian genocide, Knar Yemenidjian, survivor

#ArmenianGenocide survivor Aleksan Markaryan dies in Los Angeles aged 110

January 27, 2017 By administrator

Armenian Genocide survivor Aleksan Markaryan has died in Los Angeles at the age of 110.

Markaryan passed away on January 15, his funeral ceremony taking place on January 24, Asbarez reports.

Despite his age, he was always willing to share his memories on the Armenian Genocide and gave interviews.

Markaryan was born in the city of Gesaria of the Ottoman Empire in 1906. The family temporarily converted to Islam to save their lives but at the end of the war they reclaimed their Armenian names. In 1946, Markaryan moved to Yerevan with his family. They then relocated to Los Angeles in the 80s.

Filed Under: Articles, Genocide Tagged With: Aleksan Markaryan, dies, Genocide, survivor

Last Canadian survivor of Armenian genocide dies at 107

January 21, 2017 By administrator

Knar Yemenidjian looks through old family photos at her seniors’ residence in Montreal. (René Saint-Louis/Radio-Canada)

Montreal resident Knar Yemenidjian lived to 107, but the Armenian genocide survivor was lucky to have made it past the age of six.

Yemenidjian died Thursday, just weeks shy of her 108th birthday.

The mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, who moved to Montreal in 1971, was the last living link for Canada’s Armenian community to the horrors inflicted on their ancestors in Turkey beginning in 1915.

“We’re all grieving with the family,” said Armen Yeganian, Armenia’s ambassador to Canada. “But she was also a bigger symbol, I would imagine, for the Canadian Armenian community and for Armenian people in general.”

That role as living symbol was a responsibility Yemenidjian took seriously, appearing at commemoration events as long as she was physically able.

Sent into hiding

When the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turk soldiers began in 1915, Yemenidjian and her family were hidden on a farm outside their hometown of Caesarea by one of her father’s colleagues in the Turkish army.

For months, they lived in a barn with little food, sleeping on the floor with the farm animals. In a recent interview, Yemenidjian’s son, Hovsep, said his mother recalled their constant hunger.

When it was safe, Yemenidjian and her family returned to find their home burned down, along with those of their Armenian neighbours, many of whom had been murdered.

They rebuilt the family home and lived under Muslim identities in Caesarea, now Kayseri, for 10 years.

“They were given Muslim identities, Muslim names and made to convert to Islam and accept Muhammad as their prophet,” Hovsep said.

New turmoil, then refuge in Canada

Yemenidjian and her family eventually left Turkey for Egypt, where they joined other Armenian survivors.

There, amid the turmoil of another world war, Knar met Jean Yemenidjian, whom she married in Alexandria in 1943.

The couple had three children — Joseph, Hovsep and a daughter, who died young.

In 1956, the Armenian community in Egypt once again found itself the object of persecution, this time as a result of the Suez Canal Crisis.

The crisis unleashed a wave of Arab nationalism that brought resentment and even hostility toward Europeans and Armenians in its wake.

The tensions led Hovsep and his brother to leave Egypt for Canada, where they settled in Montreal.

On a visit with her boys in 1967 for Expo 67, Yemenidjian fell for Montreal and finally moved here for good.

‘At peace with herself’

Her son Joseph reflected on the inner strength and peace that kept his mother going despite the terror she knew as a child.

“The reason she lived so long was she was so strong and at peace with herself,” Joseph said.

While Yemenidjian lived to the see the Canadian government formally recognize the Armenian genocide in 2004, her death preceded any sign of an apology from the Turkish government.

Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks during and after the First World War, an event viewed by many scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century.

Turkey disputes the description. It says the death toll has been inflated and considers those killed victims of a civil war.

It’s believed that no more than 100 survivors of the genocide are still alive today.

source: http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/last-canadian-survivor-of-armenian-genocide-dies-at-107/ar-AAm4wmI

Filed Under: Genocide, News Tagged With: 107, armenian genocide, dies, Knar Yemenidjian, survivor

LOS ANGELES: Oldest Known Armenian Genocide Survivor Featured on Fox 11

October 7, 2016 By administrator

oldest-genocide-survivorLOS ANGELES (FOX 11)—The last known survivor of the Armenian Genocide was a special guest at an event hosted by the Armenian Law Students’ Association at Loyola Law School.

Aleksan Markaryan shared his memories of the genocide, also known as the Armenian Holocaust.

Markaryan is 110 years-old. He was about nine years old when the genocide began in 1915.

He said he was fired from his childhood job at a pharmacy because he was a Christian.

Markaryan remembers being called an infidel. In order to save his life, he converted to Islam.

He remembers watching people in his village as they were taken away to never be again, the genocide ended a long eight years later in 1923.

During that time, up to one-point-five million Armenians were exterminated by the Ottoman Government – now modern Turkey.

Filed Under: Articles, Genocide Tagged With: armenian genocide, oldest known, survivor

One of world’s last survivors of Armenian Genocide dies at 102

August 11, 2016 By administrator

genocide-survivor-diesRamela Carman, a longtime Oakland County resident and one of the world’s last survivors of the Armenian Genocide, has died at age 102,

Mrs. Carman was a treasured family member and devoted worshipper at St. John for many years, said Jeff Axt of Bloomfield Township, a cousin and Parish Council chairman.

“On top of that, she was a symbol of what the Armenian people have endured,” he said.

She was born April 7, 1914 in Yozgat, Turkey, and died Saturday, Aug. 6, 2016, with her family by her side.

Mrs. Carman, a former Pontiac resident, was believed to be one of only about 30 survivors worldwide of the event that resulted in the deaths of as many as 2 million people. She was the last remaining genocide survivor in Michigan.

As her family gathered to celebrate her 102nd birthday last April, Mrs. Carman reflected on stories that relatives told her about the genocide. She was too young to have horrific memories of it, but relatives told her that her father was one of the people whom the government forced to march off one day.

“He turned back,” she said, explaining that he wore disguises, changed his name, went into hiding — did whatever was necessary to stay alive. He later reunited with his family but died of kidney disease after just a short time.

Mrs. Carman recalled that even after the genocide “ended” in 1918, there was often different treatment for Armenians, who couldn’t ever predict how they would be received.

With her mother and grandmother, Mrs. Carman relocated from their small village to Istanbul. Her mother worked in a factory and her grandmother worked as a cook. By the time she was 16, both her mother and grandmother became too ill to work and she took responsibility for supporting them.

She worked in a factory and later bought a sewing machine and assembled men’s shirts.

In 1960, she came to the United States, marrying Masa Carman a few months after arriving. She taught herself English and was later hired by Hagopian to repair their Oriental rugs. Later, in retirement, she and her husband enjoyed traveling together.

After her husband died in 1995, she traveled to France and Turkey to visit relatives. She visited Turkey again in 2001.

Axt said she fell and broke her hip about six weeks ago, leading to a series of related health problems.

 

Source Panorama.am

Filed Under: Articles, Genocide Tagged With: Armenian, died, Genocide, survivor

Elie Wiesel, Auschwitz Survivor and Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Dies at 87

July 2, 2016 By administrator

Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

By JOSEPH BERGER  JULY 2, 2016

Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor who became an eloquent witness for the six million Jews slaughtered in World War II and who, more than anyone else, seared the memory of the Holocaust on the world’s conscience, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.

Menachem Rosensaft, a longtime friend and the founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, confirmed the death in a phone call.

Mr. Wiesel was the author of several dozen books and was a charismatic lecturer and humanities professor. In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But he was defined not so much by the work he did as by the gaping void he filled. In the aftermath of the Germans’ systematic massacre of Jews, no voice had emerged to drive home the enormity of what had happened and how it had changed mankind’s conception of itself and of God. For almost two decades, the traumatized survivors — and American Jews, guilt-ridden that they had not done more to rescue their brethren — seemed frozen in silence.

But by the sheer force of his personality and his gift for the haunting phrase, Mr. Wiesel, who had been liberated from Buchenwald as a 16-year-old with the indelible tattoo A-7713 on his arm, gradually exhumed the Holocaust from the burial ground of the history books.

It was this speaking out against forgetfulness and violence that the Nobel committee recognized when it awarded him the peace prize in 1986.

“Wiesel is a messenger to mankind,” the Nobel citation said. “His message is one of peace, atonement and human dignity. His belief that the forces fighting evil in the world can be victorious is a hard-won belief.”

Mr. Wiesel first gained attention in 1960 with the English translation of “Night,” his autobiographical account of the horrors he witnessed in the camps as a teenage boy. He wrote of how he had been plagued by guilt for having survived while millions died, and tormented by doubts about a God who would allow such slaughter.

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed,” Mr. Wiesel wrote. “Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself. Never.”

Mr. Wiesel went on to write novels, books of essays and reportage, two plays and even two cantatas. While many of his books were nominally about topics like Soviet Jews or Hasidic masters, they all dealt with profound questions resonating out of the Holocaust: What is the sense of living in a universe that tolerates unimaginable cruelty? How could the world have been mute? How can one go on believing? Mr. Wiesel asked the questions in spare prose and without raising his voice; he rarely offered answers.

“If I survived, it must be for some reason,” he told Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times in an interview in 1981. “I must do something with my life. It is too serious to play games with anymore, because in my place, someone else could have been saved. And so I speak for that person. On the other hand, I know I cannot.”

There may have been better chroniclers who evoked the hellish minutiae of the German death machine. There were arguably more illuminating philosophers. But no single figure was able to combine Mr. Wiesel’s moral urgency with his magnetism, which emanated from his deeply lined face and eyes as unrelievable melancholy.

“He has the look of Lazarus about him,” the Roman Catholic writer François Mauriac wrote of Mr. Wiesel, a friend.

President Obama, who visited the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp with Mr. Wiesel in 2009, called him a “living memorial.”

“He raised his voice, not just against anti-Semitism, but against hatred, bigotry and intolerance in all its forms,” the president said Saturday in a statement. “He implored each of us, as nations and as human beings, to do the same, to see ourselves in each other and to make real that pledge of ‘never again.’”

For much of his life, Mr. Wiesel grappled with what he called his “dialectical conflict”: the need to recount what he had seen and the futility of explaining an event that defied reason and imagination. In his Nobel speech, he said that what he had done with his life was to try “to keep memory alive” and “to fight those who would forget.” “Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices,” he said.

A year earlier, on April 19, 1985, Mr. Wiesel stirred deep emotions when, at a White House ceremony at which he accepted the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement, he tried to dissuade President Ronald Reagan from taking time from a planned trip to West Germany to visit a military cemetery there, in Bitburg, where members of Hitler’s elite Waffen SS were buried.

“That place, Mr. President, is not your place,” he said. “Your place is with victims of the SS.”

Mr. Reagan, amid much criticism, went ahead and laid a wreath at Bitburg. Paradoxically, the confrontation led to Mr. Wiesel’s first postwar visit to Germany. He said afterward that he had been extremely moved by the young German students he met and the depth of their painful search for an understanding of their country’s past. He urged reconciliation.

“Has Germany ever asked us to forgive?” Mr. Wiesel asked. “To my knowledge, no such plea was ever made. With whom am I to speak about forgiveness, I, who don’t believe in collective guilt. Who am I to believe in collective innocence?”

Mr. Wiesel had a leading role in the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, serving as chairman of the commission that united rival survivor groups to raise funds for a permanent structure. The museum became one of Washington’s most powerful attractions.

“He was a singular moral voice,” said Sara J. Bloomfield, the museum’s director. “And he brought a kind of moral and intellectual leadership and eloquence, not only to the memory of the Holocaust, but to the lessons of the Holocaust, that was just incomparable. There is nothing that can replace the survivor voice — that power, that authenticity.”

Denouncing Persecution

In his 1966 book, “The Jews of Silence: A Personal Report on Soviet Jewry,” Mr. Wiesel called attention to Jews who were being persecuted for their religion and yet barred from emigrating. “What torments me most is not the Jews of silence I met in Russia, but the silence of the Jews I live among today,” he said. His efforts helped ease emigration restrictions.

Mr. Wiesel condemned the massacres in Bosnia in the mid-1990s — “If this is Auschwitz again, we must mobilize the whole world,” he said — and denounced others in Cambodia, Rwanda and the Darfur region of Sudan. He condemned the burnings of black churches in the United States and spoke out on behalf of the blacks of South Africa and the tortured political prisoners of Latin America.

Yet the plight of Jews was foremost. In 2013, when the United States was in talks with Iran about limiting that country’s nuclear weapons capability, Mr. Wiesel took out a full-page advertisement in The Times urging Mr. Obama to insist on a “total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure” and its “repudiation of genocidal intent against Israel.”

Central to Mr. Wiesel’s work was reconciling the concept of a benevolent God with the evil of the Holocaust. “Usually we say, ‘God is right,’ or ‘God is just’ — even during the Crusades we said that,” he once observed. “But how can you say that now, with one million children dead?”

Still, he never abandoned faith; indeed, he became more devout as the years passed, praying near his home or in Brooklyn’s Hasidic synagogues. On the airplane that was to take him to an Israel darkened by the Arab-Israeli war in 1973, he sat shoeless with a friend, and together they hummed Hasidic melodies.

“If I have problems with God, why should I blame the Sabbath?” he once said.

Mr. Wiesel had his detractors. The literary critic Alfred Kazin wondered whether he had embellished some stories, and questions were raised about whether “Night” was a memoir or a novel, as it was sometimes classified on high school reading lists.

Mr. Wiesel blazed a trail that produced libraries of Holocaust literature and countless film and television dramatizations. While some of this work was enduring, he denounced much of it as “trivialization.”

What gave him his moral authority in particular was that Mr. Wiesel, as a pious Torah student, had lived the hell of Auschwitz in his flesh.

Eliezer Wiesel was born on Sept. 30, 1928, in the small city of Sighet, in the Carpathian Mountains near the Ukrainian border in what was then Romania. His father, Shlomo, was a Yiddish-speaking shopkeeper worldly enough to encourage his son to learn modern Hebrew and introduce him to the works of Freud. Later in life, Mr. Wiesel was able to describe his father in less saintly terms, as a preoccupied man he rarely saw until they were thrown together in Auschwitz. His mother, the former Sarah Feig, and his maternal grandfather, Dodye Feig, a Viznitz Hasid, filled his imagination with mystical tales of Hasidic masters.

He grew up with his three sisters, Hilda, Batya and Tzipora, in a setting reminiscent of Sholom Aleichem’s stories. “You went out on the street on Saturday and felt Shabbat in the air,” he wrote of his community of 15,000 Jews. But his idyllic childhood was shattered in the spring of 1944 when the Nazis marched into Hungary. With Allied troops fast approaching, many of Sighet’s Jews convinced themselves that they might be spared. But the city’s Jews were swiftly confined to two ghettos and then assembled for deportation.

“One by one, they passed in front of me,” he wrote in “Night,” “teachers, friends, others, all those I had been afraid of, all those I could have laughed at, all those I had lived with over the years. They went by, fallen, dragging their packs, dragging their lives, deserting their homes, the years of their childhood, cringing like beaten dogs.”

“Night” recounted a journey of several days spent in an airless cattle car before the narrator and his family arrived in a place they had never heard of: Auschwitz. Mr. Wiesel recalled how the smokestacks filled the air with the stench of burning flesh, how babies were burned in a pit, and how a monocled Dr. Josef Mengele decided, with a wave of a bandleader’s baton, who would live and who would die. Mr. Wiesel watched his mother and his sister Tzipora walk off to the right, his mother protectively stroking Tzipora’s hair.

“I did not know that in that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever,” he wrote.

In Auschwitz and in a nearby labor camp called Buna, where he worked loading stones onto railway cars, Mr. Wiesel turned feral under the pressures of starvation, cold and daily atrocities. “Night” recounts how he became so obsessed with getting his plate of soup and crust of bread that he watched guards beat his father with an iron bar while he had “not flickered an eyelid” to help.

When Buna was evacuated as the Russians approached, its prisoners were forced to run for miles through high snow. Those who stumbled were crushed in the stampede. After the prisoners were taken by train to another camp, Buchenwald, Mr. Wiesel watched his father succumb to dysentery and starvation and shamefully confessed that he had wished to be relieved of the burden of sustaining him. When his father’s body was taken away on Jan. 29, 1945, he could not weep.

“I had no more tears,” he wrote.

On April 11, after eating nothing for six days, Mr. Wiesel was among those liberated by the United States Third Army. Years later, he identified himself in a famous photograph among the skeletal men lying supine in a Buchenwald barracks.

Only after the war did he learn that his two elder sisters had not perished.

A Postwar Mission

In the days after Buchenwald’s liberation, he decided that he had survived to bear witness, but vowed that he would not speak or write of what he had seen for 10 years. “I didn’t want to use the wrong words,” he once explained.

He was placed on a train of 400 orphans that was diverted to France, and he was assigned to a home in Normandy under the care of a Jewish organization. There he mastered French by reading the classics, and in 1948 he enrolled in the Sorbonne. He supported himself as a tutor, a Hebrew teacher and a translator and began writing for the French newspaper L’Arche.

In 1948, L’Arche sent him to Israel to report on that newly founded state. He became the Paris correspondent for the daily Yediot Ahronot as well, and in that role he interviewed Mr. Mauriac, who encouraged him to write about his war experiences. In 1956 he produced an 800-page memoir in Yiddish. Pared to 127 pages and translated into French, it then appeared as “La Nuit.” It took more than a year to find an American publisher, Hill & Wang, which offered him an advance of just $100.

Though well reviewed, the book sold only 1,046 copies in the first 18 months. “The Holocaust was not something people wanted to know about in those days,” Mr. Wiesel told Time magazine in 1985.

The mood shifted after Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina by Israel in 1960 and the wider world, in watching his televised trial in Jerusalem, began to grasp anew the enormity of the German crimes. Mr. Wiesel began speaking more widely, and as his popularity grew, he came to personify the Holocaust survivor.

“Night” went on to sell more than 10 million copies, three million of them after Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club in 2006 and traveled with Mr. Wiesel to Auschwitz.

Mr. Wiesel wrote an average of a book a year, 60 books by his own count in 2015.

Many of his books were translated from French by his Vienna-born wife, Marion Erster Rose, who survived the war hidden in Vichy, France. They married in Jerusalem in 1969, when Mr. Wiesel was 40, and they had one son, Shlomo Elisha. They survive him, as do a stepdaughter, Jennifer Rose, and two grandchildren.

For Mr. Wiesel, fame did not erase the scars left by the Holocaust — the nightmares, the perpetual insecurity, the inability to laugh deeply. “I live in constant fear,” he said in 1983. In 2007, a 22-year-old man who called Mr. Wiesel’s account of the Holocaust fictitious pulled him out of a hotel elevator in San Francisco and attacked him. (The man was convicted of assault.

From 1972 to 1976, Mr. Wiesel was a professor of Judaic studies at City College, where many of his students were children of survivors. In 1976 he was appointed the Andrew W. Mellon professor in the humanities at Boston University, and that job became his institutional anchor.

In an effort to promote understanding between conflicting ethnic groups, Mr. Wiesel also started the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Through a synagogue acquaintance of Mr. Wiesel’s, it invested its endowment with the money manager Bernard L. Madoff, and his decades-long Ponzi scheme, revealed in 2008, cost the foundation $15 million. Mr. Wiesel and his wife lost millions of dollars in personal savings as well.

Mr. Wiesel lived long enough to achieve a particular satisfying redemption. In 2002, he dedicated a museum in his hometown, Sighet, in the very house from which he and his family had been deported to Auschwitz. With uncommon emotion, he told the young Romanians in the crowd, “When you grow up, tell your children that you have seen a Jew in Sighet telling his story.”

Katie Rogers, Eli Rosenberg and Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

Filed Under: Genocide, News Tagged With: Auschwitz, dead, Elie-Wiesel, survivor

102 years old, the survivor of the Armenian Genocide Hope yet (Video)

November 2, 2014 By administrator

arton104906-480x351Anahit Minasyan and Tatevik Gregoras

Photos Arthur Harutyunian

Armenpress

Aknalich October 21

The Armenian Genocide, undertaken by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War the beginning of last century, is one of the greatest crimes against humanity. As we approach the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, the new project set up by Armenpress agency is dedicated to the history of witnesses and survivors of the disaster to show the world once again that our request for Genocide recognition Armenian is fair and justified. This time the story is Arshaluys Muradyan, citizen of the town of Echmiadzin Aknalich District, in the region of Ararat. She was born in 1912. “Do you think we came voluntarily? The Turks attacked us and killed and we came here. Thank God we survived, “- it was with these words that the old lady of 102 years begins his story. Arshaluys to save his parents were lying in a cart and have covered in grass.

Those who lived those events reported that many at that time have used this method to hide their children and prevent it from being removed. The family was able to Armenia is without the loss of one of its members. It was established in the village of Alagyaz before moving to Aknalich.

Armenian Genocide
102 years old, the survivor of the Genocide Hope yet
 Anahit Minasyan and Tatevik Gregoras

Photos Arthur Harutyunian

Armenpress

Aknalich October 21

The Armenian Genocide, undertaken by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War the beginning of last century, is one of the greatest crimes against humanity. As we approach the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, the new project set up by Armenpress agency is dedicated to the history of witnesses and survivors of the disaster to show the world once again that our request for Genocide recognition Armenian is fair and justified. This time the story is Arshaluys Muradyan, citizen of the town of Echmiadzin Aknalich District, in the region of Ararat. She was born in 1912. “Do you think we came voluntarily? The Turks attacked us and killed and we came here. Thank God we survived, “- it was with these words that the old lady of 102 years begins his story. Arshaluys to save his parents were lying in a cart and have covered in grass.

Those who lived those events reported that many at that time have used this method to hide their children and prevent it from being removed. The family was able to Armenia is without the loss of one of its members. It was established in the village of Alagyaz before moving to Aknalich.

“The Turks have confined forty young in a barn and set it on fire. We Armenians went through terrible days because of the Turks, “says Arshaluys Muradyan.

In 1933, the heroine of this story Sahak married a man from her village, and gave birth to ten children. Despite the many difficulties in his life, the old lady believes she was lucky. She has helped over a hundred unborn children.

The Muradyans surrounded the older members of the family for all their care and all their affection. They talk smiling passion of their grandmother for Armenian serials. There are three years, the whole family celebrated the 100th anniversary of grandmother Arshaluys; On this occasion, she sang and danced. Those who lived the time of the massacres wants peace on the world and that youth is happy and healthy.

Translation Gilbrt Béguian for Armenews

Sunday, November 2, 2014,
Jean Eckian © armenews.com

Filed Under: Articles, Genocide Tagged With: 102 years old, armenian genocide, survivor

The extraordinary story of 100-year-old Armenian Genocide survivor

March 31, 2014 By administrator

Re-published from The Independent

She was a child of the Great War, born on a faraway killing field of which we know little, one of the very last witnesses to the last century’s first genocide, sitting in 100 year oldher wheelchair, smiling at us, talking of Jesus and the Armenian children whipped by the Turkish police whom she saw through the cracks in her wooden front door. It’s not every day you get to meet so finite an observer of human history, and soon, alas, we will not see her like again in our lifetime.

They took me to meet Yevnigue Salibian last week up in the Mission Hills of California, whose warm breezes and palm trees are not unlike the town of Aintab in which she was born more than a hundred years ago. She is an old lady now in a home for the elderly but with a still impeccable memory and an equally sharp and brutal scar on her thigh – which she displays without embarrassment – where a horse’s reins suspended her above a ravine until she almost bled to death in her final flight from her Armenian homeland. “Hushhhhhh,” she says. “That’s how the blood sounded when it poured out of me. “I still remember it: ‘hushhhhhh’, ‘hushhhhhh’.”

The facts of the Armenian Holocaust are as clear and real as those of the later Jewish Holocaust. But they must be repeated because the state of Turkey remains a holocaust denier, still insisting that the Ottoman government did not indulge in the genocide which destroyed a million and a half of its Armenian Christian population almost a century ago. The Armenians were axed and knifed and shot in their tens of thousands, the women and children sent on death marches into the deserts of northern Syria where they were starved and raped and slaughtered. The Turks used trains and a primitive gas chamber, a lesson the Germans learned well. Very soon, there will be no more Yevnigues to tell their story.

She was born on 14 January 1914, the daughter of Aposh Aposhian, an Aintab copper merchant who taught his five children the story of Jesus from a large Bible which he held on his lap as he sat with them on a carpet on the floor of their home. They were – like so many Armenians – a middle-class family, and Aposh had Turkish friends and, although Yevnigue does not say so, it appears he traded with the Ottoman army; which probably saved their lives. When the first deportations began, the Salibians were left in their home, but the genocide lasted till the very last months of the Great War – it had begun within weeks of the Allied landings at Gallipoli – and in 1917, the Turks were still emptying Aintab of its Armenians. That’s when the sound of crying led three-year-old Yevnigue to the front door of her home.

“It was an old wooden door and there were cracks in it and I looked through the cracks,” she says. “There were many children outside without shoes and the Turkish gendarmes were using whips to drive them down the street. A few had parents. We were forbidden to take food to them. The police were using whips on the children and big sticks to beat them with. The sounds of the children screaming on the deportation – still I hear them as I look through the cracked door.”

So many parents were killed in the first year of the Armenian genocide that the orphans – tens of thousands of feral children who swarmed through the land in their absence – were only later driven out by the Turks: these were tiny deportees whom Yevnigue saw. The Aposhians, however, were able to cling on until the French army arrived in eastern Turkey after the Ottoman surrender. But when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk launched a guerrilla war against the French occupiers of his land, the French retreated – and in 1921 the surviving Armenians fled with them to Syria, among them Yevnigue and her family, packed into two horse-drawn carts. She was among the very last Christians to leave her Armenian
homeland.

“My family was divided between the two carts. I changed places with an old lady. It was at night and over a ravine, our horses panicked, and the cart overturned and an iron bar killed the old lady and I was thrown over the edge of a bridge and only the horse’s reins saved me when they got wrapped around my leg. Jesus saved me. I hung there and there was the ‘hushhhhhh’ sound of my blood pouring out of me.” Yevnigue shows the harsh scar on her leg. It has bitten deeply into the muscle. She was unconscious for two days, slowly recovering in Aleppo, and then Damascus and finally in the sanctuary of Beirut.

The remainder of her life – as she tells it – was given to God, her husband and the tragedy of losing one of her sons in a Lebanese road accident in 1953. A photograph taken on her arrival in Beirut shows Yevnigue to have been an extraordinarily pretty young woman and she had, she says, many suitors. She eventually chose a bald-headed Evangelical preacher, an older man called Vahran Salibian who had a big smile and whose name – Salibi – means crusader. “He had no hair on his head but he had Jesus in his heart,” Yevnigue announces to me. Vahran died in 1995 after 60 years of marriage and Yevnigue has lost count of her great grandchildren – there are at least 22 so far – but she is happy in her cheerful Armenian nursing home.

“It’s not a good thing to be away from your family – but I like this place. Here, it is my extended family.” She loves America, Yevnigue says. Her family fled there when the civil war began in Lebanon in 1976. “It is a free place. All people come from everywhere to America. But why is our President a Muslim?”

I try to convince her this is untrue. She reads the New Testament every day and she talks constantly of her love for Jesus – this is an old lady who will be happy to die, I think – and when I ask her how she feels today about the Turks who tried to destroy the Armenians, she replies immediately. “I pray for Turkey. I pray for the Turkish officials that they may see Jesus. All that is left of the Prophet Mohamed is dust. But Jesus is alive in heaven.”

And I am taken aback by this, until I suddenly realise that I am not hearing the voice of a hundred-year-old lady. I am listening to a three-year old Armenian girl whose father is reading the Bible on the floor of a house in Aintab and who is looking through the cracks of her wooden front door and witnessing her people’s persecution.

Filed Under: Articles, Genocide Tagged With: Armenian, armenian genocide, survivor

Support Gagrule.net

Subscribe Free News & Update

Search

GagruleLive with Harut Sassounian

Can activist run a Government?

Wally Sarkeesian Interview Onnik Dinkjian and son

https://youtu.be/BiI8_TJzHEM

Khachic Moradian

https://youtu.be/-NkIYpCAIII
https://youtu.be/9_Xi7FA3tGQ
https://youtu.be/Arg8gAhcIb0
https://youtu.be/zzh-WpjGltY





gagrulenet Twitter-Timeline

Tweets by @gagrulenet

Archives

Books

Recent Posts

  • U.S. Judge Dismisses $500 Million Lawsuit By Azeri Lawyer Against ANCA & 29 Others
  • These Are the Social Security Offices Expected to Close This Year, Musk call SS Ponzi Scheme
  • Breaking News, Pashinyan regime has filed charges against public figure Edgar Ghazaryan,
  • ANCA’s Controversial Endorsement: Implications for Armenian Voters
  • (MHP), Devlet Bahçeli, has invited Kurdish Leader Öcalan to the Parliament “Ask to end terrorism and dissolve the PKK.”

Recent Comments

  • administrator on Turkish Agent Pashinyan will not attend the meeting of the CIS Council of Heads of State
  • David on Turkish Agent Pashinyan will not attend the meeting of the CIS Council of Heads of State
  • Ara Arakelian on A democratic nation has been allowed to die – the UN has failed once more “Nagorno-Karabakh”
  • DV on A democratic nation has been allowed to die – the UN has failed once more “Nagorno-Karabakh”
  • Tavo on I’d call on the people of Syunik to arm themselves, and defend your country – Vazgen Manukyan

Copyright © 2025 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in