This post stays on top today.

Today, April 24th, is the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian Genocide.

I have so many things to say, so many emotions, I will say just two:

First, why is it that so many Americans know nothing of a genocide that killed nearly as many as Hitler's reign of terror over the Jews in Europe? Like the Jews, the Christian Armenians were pursued and killed by the Muslim turks for no reason other than their religion. It was wholesale slaughter. Men, and young boys were murdered outright, women, girls, and the elderly were forced to march for miles. Most died along the way. Armenian girls were sold into slavery in turkish homes and were raped by turkish soldiers. Yet almost no one here knows the story...

Second, a personal story. My father's stepmother was already a widow with 7 children at the time of the genocide. Her children were young, but not babies. She knew that they would never survive without some kind of plan. So she disguised herself and her children as turkish arabs, and moved from town to town posing as an arab widow. She made what little living she could scrape together by sewing for wealthy turkish families, all the while hiding her true identity. Over the course of a couple of years she and her children crossed turkey on foot, and eventually came under the protection of some Christian arabs who helped them escape to Lebanon. Eventually, they made their way to France, and some of them, including my father's stepmother, made it to the US.

Their sacrifice deserves to be remembered.
For more on the genocide, go here and here.

Posted by: caltechgirl at 11:42 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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