"I am a Sassun girl," boast Grandmother Nuri, who lives in the village of Araks in Sardarapat.

"How are Sassuntsis different from other people, that you say it with such pride?" we asked.

"Sassuntsis are brave and handsome," she replied.

Grandmother Nuri is a Genocide survivor. She remembers the massacres, although she can't say for sure how old she is. "She doesn't know her own birthday or her children's," her son Khachik told us. "About my birthday, she says there was a strong wind that day. In her passport it says she was born in 1919, but she's older than that. My father, who was born in 1900, said that my mother was born in either 1912 or 1913."

"Turkish soldiers came to drink water from the spring. I remember they sat near the spring, took off their hats, put their handkerchiefs on their heads, and then put the hats back on. They drank the water and then went and burned down our village. They forced the women and children into a house, tied them up with reeds and burned them. They took the men away, no one knew where, and put them to work." This is all that Grandmother Nuri remembers of the events of 1915. She suffered a stroke four months ago and speaks with difficulty. "Why did the Turks kill Armenians?" we asked. "For the land," she answered.

Her children picked up the story. "Our father Aziz always told us about the massacres," Khachik said. "He told us how the Turks burned Armenians in the village of Shlmo , where he was born. They took the grain and barley out of the granaries and gave it to their horses, and then they shoved Armenians into the granaries and burned them. He said that so much smoke would come out that even the dogs ran away." Fifteen-year old Aziz Khudoyan (Avetisyan) survived thanks to a Kurdish name and Kurdish neighbors.

"My father told us that until he was twelve or thirteen he dressed like a girl, so no one would know he was a boy," Khachik recounted. "To save their children from the Turkish sword, Armenian parents would put them into service with Kurds. Boys worked for Kurds either as servants or herdsmen and shepherds. My father survived the massacres of 1915 because he worked for the Kurds. He said that there were good people among the Kurds who felt sorry for the Armenian children."

One of Aziz's three sisters, Manushak, was lost during the massacres of 1915. "My father looked for her till the end of his life, with the help of a friend who lived in Turkey , but he never found her," said Nuri's daughter, who was named after the aunt she never saw. "Another sister, who was three years old at the time, was trampled and killed by the horses of the Turks that came into the village. He saw it from his hiding place. My third aunt, who'd been staying in the next village, survived, and she lived in Turkey till she died in 1964."

Nuri married with Aziz in Shlmo in the province of Sasoon when she was twelve. They married her off early so the Kurds wouldn't kidnap her and force her to marry," Manushak explains. They neither went to the church nor wore wedding clothes. "There were no priests left in the village; everyone had run away. There wasn't even a school where we could learn Armenian. We'd read the Quran in Kurdish; we were afraid to speak Armenian," Nuri explained. "Do you know any prayers in Armenian?" we asked. "Yes, Our Father ; my parents taught me that," she said.

The Khudoyan family stayed on in Shlmo after the Genocide. "My father was a craftsman. He whitened dishes. He went from village to village whitening the dishes of Kurds and Turks. That's why they didn't touch him," Khachik said. In 1941 Aziz Khudoyan was drafted into the Turkish army. "They didn't let my husband come home for three years. We didn't even know where he was," Grandmother Nuri said.

Khachik continued, "My mother and my aunt filed a complaint about it and then found out from the archives where my father was serving. They sent him home for a couple of days. He stayed four or five days and they decided to escape to Syria. There were three of them: my mother, my father, and my three-year-old brother. They left the lamp on at night as if they were at home, took their clothes and left on their donkey. They took two satchels, put my brother in one, and bread and water in the other one, and ran away,"

"They were helped across the border by caravan drivers, who made money taking Armenians to different countries," Nuri's daughter explained. The Khudoyans stayed in Syria until 1947.

"We didn't have a future in Syria so we resettled in Armenia," Khachik said. "At first we went to the village of Artsvashen in the Karmir region. There was a famine; the committee dealing with resettlement issues moved us to Vedi where there were a lot of Azerbaijanis. In 1951 and 1952, by a government decision, all the Azerbaijanis were moved out, and they went to Azerbaijan, and their houses were given to Armenians. There were a lot of Armenian migrants from Lebanon, Greece, and Canada. In 1953, again because of a famine, we moved to Sardarapat. They told us it was a workers' village, and they were giving out bread there," Khachik said.

"There were other migrant families in Sardarapat, too. My father would often gather them together; they'd sit in our hut and remember what they had gone through, and we would listen," Khachik recalled.

Before we left, we asked Grandmother Nuri a question: "Will you go and see your village and look for your relatives if they open the Armenian-Turkish border?"

"No," she said. "What would I do there?"

Her daughter added, "My father used to say he'd only go to Turkey if they gave him a tank, and he'd sit Khachik up on it, and go from village to village and open fire."

Photo by Onnik Krikorian