Speaking to One Another - The International Raoul Wallenberg ...

Gyozal Hovhannisyan was born on the road, during the second deportation: “My mother in law used to tellme, “my dear ... let me think ... my mother-in-law’s mother-in-law came to see what they were doing. They caughtthis poor woman, tondir was just burning, so they put this woman in the burning tondir, she was incinerated. Shesays that there were large pieces of her skirt left lying over the tondir. This was in front of my mother-in-law’seyes. They incinerated her mother in law. The same happened to her mother-in-law’s brother-in-law’s wife - Zimo’smother. They put her too in tondir and incinerated her. In her own house”.Elena Ardahanyan’s grandmother escaped incineration at the last moment, along with her three children,including Elena: “My mother told me her mother’s story. [By that time] my grandpa wasn’t with us anymore.They decapitated him. Turks had forced us with a group of other people into a church in Kars, poured somekerosene and were going to light it with a match. That very moment they received a message that these poor peoplecould be exchanged with Turkish prisoners of war. My grandma was from a well-to-do family, she was raiseddelicately, and she was very young and very beautiful. So, they brought all these people from that church – amongthem was also my grandma with her three children – to Akhalkalak. They stayed at Akhalkalak for some time,my mother was a kid but she remembers this very well. The people of Akhalkalak received them well, helped themvery much. Then they took them to Tbilisi. My mother tells, they were getting to the military posts on the way duringdeportation, asking for some food. My mother remembers it from her early childhood - never in her life she ateanything that tasted like that. She said “often they were giving us borsch with a lot of meat”. My mom does notremember it well, where their mother, that is our granny, disappeared. But she remembers that once she came tothem in Tbilisi, brought some cherries, and promised to come again. Later they found out that their mother haddied... (bursts in tears...), she is buried at the public graveyard... /bursts in tears/. She was so young, so beautiful...(bursts in tears)... 28 years old. She was from a well-to-do family, raised delicately. She couldn’t stand it”.“I am not sure whether my mother-in-law or my father-in-law was from Erzurum. They were from Kars and Erzurum,but which one was from where I am not sure”. She tells that during the stampede her father took her, Nargiz,and her elder brother, and ran away. He sent his wife away a few days before – she was pregnant – theycrossed the river, he took her to her mother – his mother-in-law. She tells: “When we came to the river, my fatherfirst took my elder brother, then came back and took me, wanted to go back after the third kid but then he saw thatTurks are coming, so he couldn’t take his daughter – had to leave Nargiz there. The river was flowing this way,we were waiting, then my father said “Oh, my. They slaughtered the child; the current is red with blood”. My fatherwent on his knees but he couldn’t do anything. Somehow we managed to stand on our feet and run. When wecame, we reached that place where he left his wife, it turned out that both my mother and the child died during delivery.So we were left orphaned in the hands of our father, and later our father also died, we went to orphanage”(From Anahit Bardakchyan’s story).“My maternal... My mother’s mother... when they fled, my mother’s mother – Rehan was her name, she alwaysused to tell – when they came and crossed the river, Kurds had taken her 14-year old sister. I didn’t understand it,whether they had thrown her into the water or took her with them. But she always used to tell this” (Anahit Hovsepyan).118