On the evening of April 24, 1915…
…hundreds of Armenian
intellectuals from Constantinople
were arrested and deported by the
Ottoman Turks…
…over 800 writers, journalists,
doctors, and clergymen had been
sent into the sticks of Anatolia…
…others were simply hung in city
squares.
After the leaders and the intellectuals of the
Armenian were out of the way, the remaining
Armenians were called from their homes, told
they would be relocated, and then marched off
to concentration camps in the desert between
Jerablus and Deir-Zor where they would thirst
and starve to death in the burning sun.
“It is generally not known in the world that,
in the years preceding 1916, there was a
concerted effort made to eliminate all the
Armenian people, probably one of the
greatest tragedies that ever befell any
group.”
--Jimmy Carter
“. . . They took everyone
away . . . and they struck me.
Then I saw how they struck and
cracked my brother's skull with
an axe…”
--Soghomon Tehlirian (Survivor of the genocide)
“…they took my sister and raped her."
“I do not know
how long I
stayed
there...When I
opened my
eyes, I saw
myself
surrounded by
corpses…”
“…All the members of the caravan had been
killed. Because of the darkness I could not
distinguish everything. At first I did not know
where I was then I began to realize that I was
surrounded by corpses…”
During the years 1915 – 1919, three out of every
four Armenians were killed.
Armenians were tortured in many ways, but a
lot of them died from heartache, disease, and
lack of food and water as they were marched
into the deserts of the Ottoman Empire.
These Armenian deportees had to live in the
open desert of the Ottoman Empire with
bedding as their only shelter.
A whole family
sharing a tent in the
middle of the desert.
A man resting
under the hot
desert sun.
Other
Armenians were
not so lucky.
They were
immediately
tortured and
killed.
The Turks cut off the hands of children and let
them bleed and yell themselves to death. They
buried children alive in ditches in the desert.
They forced thousands of Armenians to march
until they died or they were shot dead.
The report says that
Armenians had been
beaten with sticks.
Doctors and high
dignitaries of the
Church had been
hanged. Families
were scattered to the
four winds.
Children as young as 8 years, were
either raped and shot in front of their
families or taken as wives
Women were forced
into the desert with
infants in their arms.
They were forced to
leave their children
by the roadside to
die.
In order to save bullets, the Turks drowned
countless Armenians in bodies of water.
The throats of the
Armenian
intellectuals were
cut and their
heads were
decapitated. Their
heads were then
lined up on
shelves.
The Turks surrounded churches that hundreds of
Armenians had taken refuge in. They pour
kerosene on the churches and burned them down
with the people in it. Anyone who came out
would be shot.
“They came and did the same thing to the
church in which our family and hundreds of
others had taken refuge. But we found a trench
that the French army, during its stay in that area,
had dug from that building to another area
where the Armenians were defending
themselves. That's how we escaped from that
second burning church.”
--Vartan Hartunian (survivor)
Armenians were not allowed to drink water, and
sometimes were shot even if they sat down to rest.
Orphan children whose parents had been
tortured and killed were sold into slavery.
The Armenians were forced into caves which the
Turks would then blow up.
The skulls of the slaughtered Armenians were
found in the caves as evidence.
The Turks standing proudly behind the skulls
of the Armenians they had just murdered.
Not only were the
Armenians murdered in
cold blood, all there
property was destroyed
and stolen. Hundreds of
historical and
architectural
monuments and
thousands of
manuscripts were
destroyed. Many
sanctuaries of the
people were desecrated.
Katherine Magarian's Story
(A survivor of the Genocide)
“The Turks, they ride in one day and get all the
men together, bring them to a church. Every
man came back out, hands tied behind them.
Then they slaughter them, like sheep, with long
knives.”
“They all die, 25 people in my family die.
You can't walk, they kill you. You walk,
they kill you. They did not care who they
kill.”
“My husband, who was a boy in my village
but I did not know him then, he saw his
mother's head cut off. The Turks, they see a
pregnant woman, they cut the baby out of
her and hold it up on their knife to show.”
“My mother and I, we run.
My mother was hit by the
Turks, she was bleeding as we
go. We walk and walk, I say
''Ma, wait, I want to look for
my little sister,'' but my
mother slap me, say ''No! Too
dangerous, we keep walking.''
It gets darker and darker, but
we walk. Still, I don't know
where. The Turks had taken
over our city.”
Children who have lost their
parents
“Two, three days we walk, little to eat. Finally,
we find my sister, who had run away. Then we
walk to Harput, and I see Turks and want to run,
but they are friendly Turks, my mother tell me.
She say, ‘You go live with them now, you'll be
safe,’ and I was.”
“I worked there, waiting on them, cleaning, but I
was alive and safe. But I don't see my mother for
five years. She was taken to the mountains to
live, and she saw hundreds of dead Armenians,
hundreds of them, who had been killed by the
Turks, bodies all over.”
“Years later, my mother say to the Turks, ''I
want to see my child,'' and they let her
come back. She came to the house at night.
She did not know me, but I know it was
her. Her voice was the same as I remember
it. I tell her who I am, she say, ''You are my
daughter!'' and we kiss, hug, and cry and
cry.”
“. . the Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of
the war, and the failure to act against Turkey is to
condone it . . . the failure to deal radically with the
Turkish horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the
future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense.”
--Theodore Roosevelt
“Turkey is taking advantage of the war in
order to thoroughly liquidate its internal
foes, the indigenous Christians, [the
Armenians] without being thereby
disturbed by foreign intervention.”
--Talatt Pasha
Turkish Troops
“What on earth do you want?
The question is settled. There
are no more Armenians.”
--Talatt Pasha (mastermind
of genocide)
Turkish Cavalry
"No Armenian can be our friend after
what we have done to them."
--Talatt Pasha
"I have accomplished more toward
solving the Armenian problem in
three months than Abdul Hamid
accomplished in thirty years!“
--Talatt Pasha
“It was not war. It was most certainly massacre
and genocide, something the world must
remember... We will always reject any attempt to
erase its record, even for some political
advantage.”
--Yossi Beilin (Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister)
"I am confident that the
whole history of the human
race contains no such
horrible episode as this…
Henry Morgenthau, Sr. US Ambassador to the
Ottoman Empire
“The great massacres and persecutions of the
past seem almost insignificant when compared
to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.”
-- Henry Morgenthau
“Who, after all, speaks today of
the annihilation of the
Armenians?”
-- Adolf Hitler
Over 1.5 million Armenians were tortured and
murdered. 800,000 others survived the forced
marched under the hot sun of the deserts of DeirZor.
TODAY WE HAVE RISEN FROM OUR
ASHES…
Dzidzernagapert:
A symbol of the
rebirth of the
Armenian
nation.
“I should like to see any power
of the world destroy this race.
This small tribe of unimportant
people. Whose wars have all
been fought and lost…
…Whose structures have all crumbled.
Their literature is unread. Their music
is unheard. And prayers are no more
answered…
--William Saroyan
…Go ahead, destroy Armenia. See if
you can do it. Send them into the desert
without bread or water. Burn their
homes and churches. Then see if they
will not laugh, sing and pray again.
For when two of them meet any where
in the world. See if they will not create
a new Armenia."
-William Saroyan Famous Armenian-American Writer