Transcriber: Xin Yue Koh Reviewer: Robert Tucker
In 1913, the Ottoman Empire came to be ruled
by Talaat, Enver and Djemal Pasha.
Under their leadership,
a national movement was orchestrated to unify the Turkic people in the region,
and ultimately remove all non-Muslims from the land.
The presence of the Armenian people, as well as other Christian minorities,
was not conducive to this new Turkish ideology,
and thus the Armenians were subjected to systematic decapitalization,
deportation and ultimate extermination.
Over a hundred years have passed
since the events that marked the start of the Armenian Genocide.
From 1915 into the early 1920s,
over 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives
at the hands of the Ottoman Turkish government.
Over 1.5 million lives cut prematurely,
over 1.5 million stories were never told.
But I'm here today
to tell one story of an Armenian Genocide survivor,
my great-grandmother, Anna Tutundjian.
Anna's story begins in Sivas, Turkey, where she was born in 1903.
She was 11 years old in the summer of 1915
when Ottoman Turkish officials came into town
and rounded up all of the Armenians.
The men and young boys were soon separated from the group,
and Anna watched
as her father, uncles and beloved cousins were shot to death.
Shortly after the men were removed and killed,
the infant babies were taken from their mothers,
including Anna's baby brother.
These babies were then buried in the ground only up to their shoulders,
and Anna watched as horses trampled over them.
All that remained at the end of the day
were the women, the young girls, and the elderly.
But fate wouldn't spare them much longer.
Soon after, the officials came back,
and they ordered all of the Armenian women,
and all who remained,
that they needed to evacuate their homes.
Anna remembers helping her mother tie whatever belongings they could
into sheets,
and sew their belongings into sheets.
And very soon, the women, including Anna, her mother and her sisters,
began a march, a death march,
ultimately through Turkey into and through the Syrian desert.
On this march, they had no food,
other than whatever they had carried from home.
And, as you can imagine, it didn't last very long.
They walked all day, and only stopped at night.
Water was scarce.
Anna says that whenever they saw a spring or a well,
they would try to go to it and fill their jugs.
But that's only if they were able to get away from the caravan
without being noticed.
Anna says she was with hundreds of women - women, children alike,
and she remembers it took about two or three days
before the first of these women began to drop out of formation.
One morning, early one morning, before the march began again,
Anna and her sisters were at a well filling their water jug.
While at the well, a man grabbed her.
Anna screamed and kicked and cried out,
and her sisters ran back to get their mother.
But by the time their mother returned, by the time the sisters returned,
Anna had been taken.
Anna does not know where her abductor took her,
but, at 11 years old, he chose her to be his new wife.
He already had a wife though.
Many, in fact,
and she became one of about 15 or 20 other young Armenian girls,
just like herself, in his harem.
Anna says that he would pretty much leave her alone,
but that he also called her his "pretty one".
Within the year, Anna had given birth to a daughter.
And by the time Anna was 13 years old, she had given birth to another.
Although she loved her children,
day after day, she thought only about running away,
she missed her mother and her sisters,
and wanted more than anything to leave this man.
The problem was she was never alone.
There was never a window of opportunity for her to do anything by herself,
let alone escape.
The girls always had to accompany each other
no matter where they went, or what they did.
If a girl stepped out of line, or tried to do anything on her own,
the girls would squeal on one another
in hopes of being rewarded by their captor.
One night, the girl who was supposed to accompany Anna to the outhouse
was too tired to do so.
She let Anna go alone,
figuring probably that Anna has two daughters,
she's going to go, do her business, and come back.
But Anna took that as an opportunity to escape.
And she did.
She ran and managed to escape ...
although alone.
She ran through the night,
and eventually made her way to an Armenian church.
However, the church couldn't help her,
and she ended up running away from them as well.
She's still only 13 years old.
She found an Armenian priest
who took her in, gave her a refuge,
and ultimately helped her to get to Aleppo, Syria,
which at the time was becoming a makeshift resettlement community
for all of the Armenians
who were surviving the death marches through the desert.
Anna lived in an orphanage for years.
She worked with other survivors, other girls her age,
working, and weaving rugs.
And every Armenian she met, she'd ask,
"Do you know my family? Do you know my mother?
Have you heard what happened to them?"
And one day, her question was answered.
"Yes, I know your mother. I know your sisters.
They're alive. They survived.
They're living in Marseilles, France."
With the help of the AGBU, the Armenian General Benevolent Union,
an Armenian humanitarian organization, still very active today,
Anna was able to go to France,
and was finally reunited with her mother.
At this point, she was in her early 20s.
This reunion, however, was short-lived
because, unbeknown to Anna,
halfway around the world in America,
her future husband was making his way to France.
Now, by 1925, my great-grandfather,
Kevork Malikyan,
had been living in America for over 20 years.
He was married
and had two daughters of his own.
One of them was a newborn,
and his wife was having a hard time producing milk for the newborn
and was given the advice that she should ice her chest.
This, however, caused her to get pneumonia,
and she died,
leaving Kevork alone to care for his two girls.
And he was able to get by for a while with the help of some relatives.
But after some time, these relatives were saying,
"This is too much for us.
You need to remarry.
You need to find a wife and someone to take care of your girls."
He was told that there was a large Armenian community
living in Marseilles.
He should go there, find a wife, bring one home.
So he did.
In 1925, my great-grandfather went to Marseilles.
He went to the rug factory where Anna was working,
and admired her.
He then found her mother, told her of his intentions,
By the time Anna came home from work that night,
the arrangements were all made.
Kevork and Anna were married the next day.
Shortly after their little wedding ceremony,
they boarded a ship and came to America.
Kevork and Anna went on to have three more children.
Their first, born in 1927, is my grandmother.
Growing up, my grandmother knew
that her mother was an Armenian Genocide survivor.
However, the genocide was never spoken about,
except in very generalized terms,
like, "The horrors we Armenians saw",
or, "The crimes the Turks, the Ottoman Turks, did to us".
After Kevork's passing in 1962,
Anna started receiving letters from relatives in Turkey.
When my grandmother questioned her about these letters,
she would say that they were from sisters of hers.
But these were sisters that Anna had never previously spoken about.
These were sisters that, growing up,
my grandmother never even knew existed.
In the beginning of the summer of 1964,
Anna announced that she was going to go visit them.
This caused my grandmother great stress
because Anna had never traveled anywhere alone in her adult life,
let alone to another country.
And she hadn't been to Turkey since she was an 11-year-old child.
But Anna was a stubborn woman, and she persisted,
and in the beginning of the summer of 1964,
she went back to Turkey.
When she returned at the end of the summer of 1964,
she sat my grandmother down and admitted to her
that the sister she had gone to visit,
the relative she had gone to visit, the women she was calling her "sisters",
weren't actually her sisters.
They were her two daughters,
the two daughters she had abandoned when she was 13 years old.
In the letters of correspondence
she had been sending back and forth to Turkey,
she found out that her abductor had died.
So for the first time in nearly 50 years,
she felt it was safe to go back and to go find these girls,
who, of course, themselves were women at the time.
It took Anna 50 years to speak the truth
of what she witnessed with the massacres
and with her experience of being abducted and the rape.
And ...
while I could have chosen to tell -
While I chose to tell Anna's story,
I could just as well have told any of my great-grandparents' story,
all of whom survived the genocide,
all of whom experienced equally incomprehensible hardships.
I am here today because of the strength that they had,
and I see that strength continue to be embodied every day
in my parents and in my grandparents.
I say that I'm an Armenian-American, a third-generation Armenian-American,
but it might be more fitting to say
that I am a third-generation Armenian Genocide survivor,
because I am the great-great-grandchild of men and women
who never even had an opportunity to dream that I would exist.
So I like to think it's my duty and my obligation
to tell their story
and to keep the history of all of those who came before me alive.
Thank you.
(Applause)