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"How I loved the snow-clad mountains.

"Clear, cool streams.

"The river, an unbridled monster

"in the spring pulverizing rocks

in the swift flow."

Khoren Davidson, survivor.

"At the water's edge, some Armenian women,

"watching the slaughter, pleaded,

"'Please shoot us and not cut our throats with the knife!'

"and the kind Turk answered, 'Don't be afraid.

"The knives have been sharpened well,

and you will not suffer much.'"Abraham Hartunian, survivor.

I was born on the banks

of the Euphrates River,

but my people have long since vanished

from their historic homeland

in a genocide that occurred in 1915.

The waters of the Euphrates were clogged with bodies.

A nation bled to death. The water turned red.

I knew that I had to make a journey of discovery.

I would seek the lost memory of my youth.

I would search for a missing part of my heritage.

So decades ago I started to look for footprints

of witnesses who had walked along the Euphrates,

searching for the faces of those who survived.

I traveled to five continents to discover Armenians

who would tell me about the death marches

in the deserts through which the Euphrates flows.

I knocked on many doors,

climbed many hills,

walked across hot desert sands.

This is the story of the survivors I found.

It is the story of eyewitnesses

whose nightmares have become my own.

It is the unvarnished, horrendous,

incomprehensible story of the Armenian Genocide

perpetrated by the Ottoman Turkish Government

in 1915.

The Euphrates,

a legendary river from the mists of history

flows past the supposed sites of the Garden of Eden.

Civilizations and empires have sought to dominate

this region from antiquity.

Many nations have struggled for mastery

of these Middle Eastern highlands.

Millenniums ago the Armenians established kingdoms

around the source of the Euphrates River.

They accepted Christianity a thousand years

before the Turks conquered their land.

At the start of the First World War,

two million Christian Armenians lived in the area

that is now known as the Republic of Turkey.

By the end of the war only half a million remained.

The rest were swept down this mighty river.

Michael Hagopian was determined to find Armenians

who had survived.

His odyssey led him down the Euphrates

to the Syrian Desert,

the final graveyard of the Armenian people.

The voices of the tortured, their songs, beckoned him

all the way to the Deir Zor desert

where the largest massacres took place.

And then the next morning they started to take us

to the desert to Deir Zor,

where it was the point of no return.

We knew that we would never come back.

So when people got to Deir Zor with no clothing on,

they even fried in the hot sun.

Far from these burning deserts,

the world was engaged

in a gigantic struggle.

For political, economic and religious reasons,

the Ottoman Turkish Government used the cover

of the First World War to eliminate

its Armenian minority.

"A Turkish policeman said, 'In this land of Islam,

we don't need another religion.

That is why there is a holy war against you.

You are the agents of European powers

and need to be exterminated.'"

In the Middle East, the fault line

between cultural societies

ran through the Armenian plateau.

The clash of civilization had been simmering for centuries.

The final blow was struck in April 1915.

Wartime Turkey was ruled by a triumvirate

of powerful men, including Enver Pasha,

Talaat Pasha and Djemal Bey.

The orders to eject the Armenians from their homes

were given by Talaat Pasha, Minister of Interior.

He dispatched his orders by telegraph

to all parts of the Empire.

"The Turks did not use loudspeakers

"or newspapers to make announcements.

"They would beat drums in the neighborhoods and yell,

"'Tonight we will gather all the Armenians

"and exile them.

"And if any Greek hides an Armenian

he will be shot on the spot.'"

"All our family was saved by a Turk,

"Mehmet Effendi, who was a factory owner.

"That man saved thousands of Armenians besides us.

"He gathered refugees as workers. Saved them all.

He was a very good man.He was a Turk, yet a good man."

The Armenians were very industrious people,

sure that they would be robbed on the way-- deportation--

so they brought a lot of their jewelry and gold

and so forth, to my father to keep for them.

And he didn't dare keep it in the house,

because he was afraid the Turks would come in and search.

So one day he took us into the chicken yard

and took a brick out of the mud brick wall,

and opened a hole behind it and put a lot of jewelry

and gold coins and so forth back in there,

and put the brick back in and cemented it up with mud.

And I got a big thrill out of being the watch dog,

because I was to keep an eye out and make sure

that the Turkish gendarme did not come around the corner

and catch my father doing this.

In Mezreh where we were living, the Turkish town crier came

and said that, "Be ready, in about couple of weeks--

couple of days we're going to take you to another city."

And nobody hardly believed them, but two days later,

some of those gendarmes came and with their rifle butts,

hit the doors. "Get out over there and get into the bunch

and we're going to take you to another city.

All we're doing is transporting you."

Evidently, it is very difficult

for the American people or others

to understand the mentality of

the Turkish government over there.

You don't-- There is no question about it.

"You are-- Come out!

We are taking you down to the government building"

or some such thing.

They're not giving any reason.

Any democratic country where you know

about the personal rights and freedoms and so on

did not exist over there.

They bang the door, they're armed, you're not.

And, that's it. "Out!"

The Turks said that they are taking us away from our homes

for our safety sake.

Then why didn't they take their families?

Why didn't they take their kids?

The break-up of their community

was a time of sorrow for the Armenians.

For the Turks it was a time of rejoicing.

The upheaval left many children homeless.

They scattered in the countryside.

Some fled to the forests.

"In the morning, I walked and walked.

"I saw a boy.

"Together we found a girl and we hid in the forest.

"We saw the Turks looking for Armenians in the forest.

"At night they would massacre the men; during the day,

"the women and the boys.

"We were lying down in the blood.

We woke up among the dead."

"How many dead did you see?"

"I can confirm 10,000-20,000.

We were walking through the dead."

"Did you see the massacres with your eyes?"

"Yes, I saw it with my eyes.

"They were massacring.

"They were yelling, men were weeping,

"and we were crying too.

"We could see them with axes and knives and clubs.

"I fled to the forest.

"There was a haystack there.

"During the night I slept there.

"I was an orphan.

"The dogs-- the wolf dogs in the forest.

I would cry. I would dig in and bury myself."

The government started rounding up Armenian children

to dispose of them in mass drownings.

Terrified orphans were everywhere.

"The Turks turned to the city's greatest Hoca,

"'Shall we slaughter the small children too?

"Does the Koran give give us permission?'

'Yes,' he answered, 'Slaughter them too. The Koran permits.'"

Abraham Hartunian.

"When the Turks entered,

"the two fearful children ran away.

"The other one saw that I was being beaten,

"and started to yell, 'Auntie, Auntie!'

"'Get lost!', they said.

"They grabbed him and sliced off his head,

"because the child loved me a great deal, and didn't want

"the Turks to beat me up.

"So they cut off his head, and cast it aside.

"We took his head and tried to stick it back to his body.

"But it was impossible.

"I didn't know if I could glue it on to save him.

"My sister was crying, all my relatives were crying.

"The child was in the center, like a chicken,

"his head fluttering from side to side,

"his body jumping to the other side.

We didn't know what to do."

"The lone voice of one Moslem priest

"was heard pleading,

"'Moslems, it is a sin to kill innocent Armenians.

It is against the law of Allah.'" Ephraim Jernazian.

"The evening before being deported,

"a crier from the minaret called, saying,

"'All those who want to change their religion,

"can stay and register at city hall tomorrow.'

"Quite a few stayed back-- rich people who didn't want

"to leave behind their land and wealth.

"The next day they changed their religion.

They became Moslems."

The Armenians were considered

a troublesome national minority,

with a different religion, language and ethnicity.

For the Ottoman Turks, religion was a key factor

in the Armenian Genocide.

The choice was clear--

Conversion or death in the desert.

Some estimates claim over 200,000--

10 to 15 percent of the Christian population--

converted.

We changed our names.

We disguised ourselves as Turks, and we went to Konya

and we lived in a Turkish town, Turkish neighborhood as Turks.

And my father used to go to mosque, and so forth.

That's how we survived.

Turkish people put me into Turkish orphanage

and since they put me there,

they give all about 300 orphans with us

test of who can call Turks

to the prayer.

They picked me out because I could sing better,

I-- they told me.

Naturally, I had to accept it because that was a force,

and I did that while I was in Turkish orphanage.

I show you what I mean.

They had circumcised me.

Because they knew that my father

was quite religious man, Armenian.

And they made me dig up some of the famous celebrities

who were buried in the church yard--

dig them up and made me urinate on them.

Made me urinate on them.

Horrible stories kept coming to my office.

Unspeakable, unbelievable.

The eyewitness testimonies of survivors overwhelmed me.

And made me urinate on them.

"Dig them up and made me--"

For 40 years I've been filming survivors

of the Armenian Genocide.

As a survivor myself I often wondered,

"Why did it happen?"

"How come it happened to the Armenians?"

I have finally come to the conclusion

that it was a clash of civilizations,

a clash of nationalities defined by religion.

The Turks conquered Armenia some 700 years ago,

yet the Armenians continued to occupy

a strategic geographical part of the Ottoman Empire.

In the 19th Century, the Armenians were influenced

by European ideas, Westernization, equality,

freedom, justice and democracy.

The Turkish ruling class feared

the Armenians would break up their empire.

So they inflamed religious fanaticism

to slaughter, deport, exterminate

and wipe the Armenians off the face of the map.

From the capital in Constantinople,

telegraphs were being sent to all the provinces

to coordinate the deportation plan.

Local lists were prepared and posted in public places

and on doors of Armenian homes.

One group from Yozgat passed through the town of Sivas

where there was a Christian mission

and a brave American woman.

My Aunt Polly,

Mary Louise Graffam,

was quite noted because she went out with these people

on the trek when they were walking-- deported.

She said to the Governor,"I'm going with these people."

And he said, "You can't go with them. I forbid you."

She said, "Well, I'm going anyhow," and she did.

It took the Turks three days to figure out

how to force her to turn back.

They were afraid of America.

They didn't dare threaten her or do anything to her.

But they finally put a pistol to the head of her driver

who was also a personal friend, and told her they would shoot

this man if she didn't turn back.

Well, she realized that she got as far as she could.

She turned back.

While on the deportation caravan,

Polly Graffam reported from Malatya ,

a town of eastern Turkey, 125 miles southeast of Sivas.

Later she sent a dispatch to the U.S. State Department,

saying, "I have tried to write only what I have seen and know

to be true, the valley was full of corpses."

It was a common sight, everywhere we were passing by,

there were bodies.

"A woman was seven months pregnant.

"Two policemen bet about the sex of her child.

"If it was a girl, the winner would get two coins.

"If a boy, he would get five coins.

"They slit her belly.

"The policeman who won the bet got five coins.

"After three hours on the road,

"the woman and child died.

I saw this with my own eyes."

I saw it with my own eyes,

a woman didn't have no milk in her breast,

so her baby was crying.

One of these Turkish soldiers grabbed the baby with--

by the arm, tossed the little thing up into the air

and another Turkish soldier caught it with his bayonet

on his rifle.

She made a little squeak, and she was gone.

I suppose I should hate the Turks, but as a Christian

I must learn to forgive them, but I will never forget

the horrible tragedy that the government and some Turks

imposed on the 1 and 1/2 million Armenians who perished.

First of all, as we came down the hills, into--

they came around a lot of Turkish men and women

and they were grabbing Armenian children.

A Turkish sergeant in the Turkish army grabbed me

by the arm, by the hand, and pulled it away

from my mother and took me away.

And weeks later, evidently the Turkish government

had changed their mind and a proclamation came around

that they must-- they should not save the Armenian children.

So they came and the policemen, the Turkish police,

knocked the door and took me away.

They took me away to a vacant Armenian home.

There were a lot of empty houses

that were made into a prison.

So there I met my sister, and there were a lot of,

at least about, close to about 100 children.

The very next day they lined us up.

They were going to take us toward the Euphrates River.

Now, I found out later what they had done.

What happened was a Turkish woman that had got--

had come to like me very much had realized what was going

to happen to the children, had come there

and he bribed one of the gendarmes,

Turkish soldiers, with two pieces of silver,

and grabbed my arm and took me away from the group.

Later we learned from the stories,

these soldiers came and told the people how they took them

to Kemakh Boghazi, a spot near the Euphrates River

which is very treacherous and dumped them there,

because they weren't going to waste their bullets.

Well, the Turkish government had evidently realized that

these children were going to grow up and remember

all the things that had happened to their parents,

and their families, and so they decided to kill,

not save the children.

This gentleman-- he was a lawyer, by the way,

Turkish lawyer-- he gave me a present to the local Turks.

He'd become to be friend with them.

And he gave me a present to them.

You were given as a present?

As a present. He said, "You like this boy?

Okay, you can have him."

And they took. In those days Armenian children had no value.

I mean, you could give them away.

You could kill them, you could do anything you want.

If you would ask me who I am, I couldn't tell you

because I don't know what's my real name.

I don't know when I was born.

I don't know when I was born.

I don't know who my parents they were.

When I was little, about four years maybe,

I remember I was living in a Turkish family.

There were a lot of people over there-- kids too.

But I was not allowed to mix with them.

I was eating separately.

I was not allowed to go in the garden or outside,

so I was watching from the window in the garden.

Eventually I was adopted from an orphanage

by an Armenian family, and they gave me the name

of Jirair Suchiasian.

Still, I don't know what's my name,

where I was born, who was my parents.

Now here I am. I am somebody, but I am nobody.

Father Guerguerian,retired priest

of the Roman Catholic Church,

also has pondered long over the issue

of his lost family, his lost heritage.

Thirty-eight years after his parents had been massacred,

he returned to the land of his birth

and made an outstanding discovery.

1953,

I went to the town Gurun

where I am born in 1911.

Mehmet Zeidan,

who spoke Armenian and Turkish,

came to see me with other Turks

in my hotel room.

And he asked me many, many questions.

And this gentleman came

and put before my feet

a basket of fruit, and in Turkish language

he told me, "This is from your garden."

And I told him in Turkish language,

"Thank you, thank you very much."

The man

lifted up his arms,

and he asked me forgiveness.

And I told him, "God bless you, God forgive you,

but I don't know who you are."

He told me that he killed father, three brothers;

and he confiscated our home and our garden.

As Father Guerguerian before me,

I also wanted to know the truth of what happened

during those dark days of 1915.

I would go to the Syrian Desert,

to the banks of the Euphrates River,

all the way to Deir Zor,

to the final graveyard of the Armenian people.

My journey passed through Aleppo in northern Syria,

once a part of the former Turkish Ottoman Empire.

During the genocide, refugees had tried to escape

the death marches by hiding in Aleppo

where they had found friendly Arabs.

U.S. Consul Jesse B. Jackson,

in a special report to the Secretary of State

on March 4, 1918, wrote:

"One of the most terrible sights ever seen

"in Aleppo was the arrival in August of 1915

"from the province of Sivas some 5,000 emaciated,

"dirty, ragged women and children

"traveling perhaps a thousand miles

and reaching Aleppo about four months afterwards."

A portion of Polly Graffam's group

of deportees from Sivas had survived.

In Aleppo, Michael Hagopian interviewed many Arabs

who remembered the arrival of these Armenians from Sivas

and elsewhere fleeing from Turkish atrocities.

I wanted only eyewitness testimonies--

what people had seen with their own eyes--

not hearsay.

Arab chieftains told me how Armenians had been

on forced marches to the desert.

And how they had been driven to Deir Zor to be finished off.

"Do you know why the Armenians came here?"

"They came from Turkey, because they were massacred

by the Turkish people."

"And when did they come?"

"I don't know exactly, but we used to say that

this child was born during the Armenian massacre year."

"And how did they come?"

"They came walking, barefoot,

"their clothes were torn;

"and their physical condition was very poor.

They settled in towns like Aleppo."

From ancient times the city of Aleppo

has been situated on a major trade route

between East and West.

Aleppo has thrived as a commercial center

for centuries.

Hotel Baron in Aleppo, owned and operated by Armenians,

has been the legendary gathering place

for such notables as Prince Hussein of Iraq

and Lawrence of Arabia.

For all intents and purposes, it was the headquarters

of the Turkish army, although it was run

on the lines of an ordinary hotel

with the staff mostly Armenian.

Djemal Pasha, the third member

of the ruling triumvirate

used this hotel as his headquarters

during the war.

Seven decades later Michael Hagopian occupied

the same second floor room in his search for survivors.

In the basement of the hotel was a secret chamber.

During the massacres and deportations

of the Armenians, a young intellectual

from Constantinople was hiding there.

His name was Aram Andonian.

He had become a friend of an Armenian chambermaid

who took care of Djemal Pasha's room.

In this way he monitored the activities

and communications of the Turkish Government.

Andonian's revelation of Turkish orders

for deportation and massacre were confirmed

by Western consular agents.

In a letter dated June 5, 1915, United States Consul

Jessie Jackson of Aleppo reported

to U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau:

"There is a living stream of Armenians

"pouring into Aleppo,

"they all come under heavy armed escort,

"usually from 300 to 500 at a time,

"and consist of old men, women, and children.

"They are being scattered over the desert

"to starve or die of disease in the burning heat.

"It is without doubt a carefully planned scheme

to thoroughly extinguish the Armenian race."

Far below in the rugged mountains of Anatolia

a family was on a death march to the desert.

Their son was desperately trying to save them,

if he could only get them to hide out in Aleppo.

Dr. Navasart Deirmendjian was a major

in the Turkish medical corps.

As a medical student in Constantinople,

he had played backgammon with Talaat Pasha.

Now he rushed to Constantinople

and with the help of a German officer,

received an audience with Talaat Pasha

who was in charge of the deportation.

"He came to me and said,

"'Do you know how to play backgammon?'

"'Yes, I know a little.

I know enough to beat you!'"

Dr. Deirmendjian approached his old friend, Talaat.

He reminded Talaat of when they had played backgammon together.

"He grabbed me and shook my hand.

"And he said, 'I am very thankful.

"I've missed you a lot. Now, what do you want?'

"My family. I don't want them to be driven further.

"Could they come back to Aleppo or to Konya?'

"He sent a telegram to the governor of Aleppo.

"The telegram read,

"'These people have to be found within 24 hours,

"and sent to Aleppo, and to stay in Aleppo

"to the end of the war.'

"These people in 24 hours they have to be in Aleppo.

They found them. They came back."

Talaat's control and knowledge of the caravans'

exact whereabouts was astonishing.

He could pick a single family out of thousands

on the deportation routes.

The next year Dr. Deirmendjian's parents

were deported again.

This time they were slaughtered.

Armin Wegner, a German, photographed the devastation

in the Aleppo region.

I came in Turkey in April 1915.

I came as a member of the Red Cross,

of the German Red Cross.

I was always willing to speak of this terrible thing.

Wegner, together with many other Germans,

condemned the Turks for their premeditated genocide

of the Armenians.

They denounced the complicity of their own government.

Wegner's photographs cover the horrors of the deportations

to the Syrian Desert.

He moved from one concentration camp to another,

east of Aleppo.

He noticed how slowly the caravans moved,

accompanied by decimated, bedraggled refugees on foot.

U.S. Consul Jackson sent Agent August Bernan

to investigate the caravans along the Euphrates.

On September 10, 1916 he reported:

"On the right bank of the Euphrates

"between Meskene and Deir Zor,

"Armenians are penned up in the open like cattle

"without shelter, almost no clothing,

"fed barely by food altogether insufficient.

"As far as the eye can reach, mounds of 200-300 corpses

"are buried pell-mell .

Nearly 60,000 Armenians are buried there."

On his search for witnesses, Michael Hagopian

moved southward along the Euphrates.

He passed through Meskene and Rakka

identifying the locations of the concentration camps.

Recently discovered pictures in the German Military Archives

support the already existing evidence:

Lt. Captain Hellmuth von Muücke ,of the German Imperial Navy,

photographed the death camps along the Euphrates.

"Wherever there was no water,

"wherever it was thorny, rocky,

"they made us walk in those areas.

Thirsty, hungry, our money gone.

"Three months later,my mother who had no more milk

"to give to the baby, the baby died.

"She couldn't tie her to my back any longer,

so she gave it into my arms.

"'It's too heavy. I can't carry it.' I said.

"She said, 'Daughter, place her under a bush. Let's go.

"I replied, 'I won't place my sister on the ground.'

"Meantime, the Turks were pressing us,

"'Walk, keep going, don't sit down.'

"The child was going to fall under our feet from my arms.

"She said, 'Put her under that bush. Let's go.'

"I won't put my sister under a bush and leave.

"'You put her there,' I said.

"She said, 'Daughter, you are the sister.

"You will forget,' she said.

"'Mother, I won't forget. Don't force me to do this.'

"She made me do it. We put her under the bush.

The soldiers were poking us to move on.

"That night there was a very heavy rain.

"I said, 'Mother, I want to go and bring my sister.

"I know the way. Do you think they would let me go?'

I cried and cried, and I fell asleep."

"One night I was awakened

"by the sound of my father crying.

"He was sobbing just like a child.

"I reached out to him and wiped his tears away

"with my fingers, and curled upon my mat to sleep.

"Then I heard someone singing, far away

"in another section of the camp.

"I can hear, to this day, that unrehearsed duet

"the sound of my father crying and the melancholy lamentation

"of the song, his voice drifting with the wind

"through the gorges of the Euphrates,

over the waters, on to the desert beyond."

Night before Turks were going to kill

the Armenians,

I woke up middle of the night.

I heard

all Armenians hollering

in Turkish language,

'Allah, Allah, nerdasin'

This is, in English, I will explain.

They were asking God, "Where are you, God?"

"Why are we being punished so much this way?"

"Why don't you save us, dear God?"

Another day,it was probably mid-afternoon,

a woman utterly exhausted,

looking up into the heavens, said:

"God, we are suffering.

Let this child not suffer any more."

And with that, she hurled

her young child down the creek,30-40 feet below.

"I could see the Euphrates River.

"I thought I saw bodies of people I knew.

"I would get close to the bank.

"I would see hundreds of naked human bodies passing by.

In a half an hour, you would see more hundreds pass by."

We lived close to river, the Euphrates.

My brother and I and some of the kids

would go swimming in the river.

And, lo and behold, we used to see

bodies floating down the river, you know.

And as we tried to swim to them, but the current was so,

so fast that we couldn't catch up with them.

Hundreds and thousands of them.

Not far from the river a drama was unfolding.

Children buried in the sands,

little girls wandering aimlessly in the wilderness.

"My mother said to me, 'Azad, run away.

"I'll also run after you.'

"She knew the way-- I did not see where she ran.

"We walked-- we walked for a month.

"We're passing through a large wilderness.

"We are walking through the desert,

"two children, my brother on my back.

"Suddenly we heard a voice.

"The sky blue, the ground sandy

"'Water, water.'

"A voice was calling.

"We ran toward the voice. We saw that it was a girl.

"We found a girl buried.

"Only her head was above the sand.

"'Water, water', she's yelling.

"We ran to where the voice was coming from.

"We started to dig down to her shoulders

"where she was buried.

"The Turk soldier had done all kinds of tortures.

"After torturing her, after raping her,

"he buried her in the sand.

"'You might as well die here like a dog.

"Hundreds, thousands died a dog's death.

"You might as well expire here.'

He left her, and went away."

"Suddenly we heard many babies crying.

"We ran towards the sound, and saw many babies buried,

"only their heads above the ground.

"Our guards got on their horses and charged towards

"the buried children and trampled them to death.

The crying voices stopped." John Yervant.

As people heard of my mission, they wrote to me

from Canada, Australia,

Europe, South America, the Middle East

and from every part of the United States.

My files expanded.

Year after year I continued my research.

I wondered, 'Were there any survivors

who still lived on the banks of the Euphrates,

in the wilderness of Deir Zor?'

During the summer and autumn of 1915,

some 870,000 Armenians arrived in Syria.

They were spread out in three lines:

one moving toward what now is Northern Iraq

another moving southward from Aleppo to Damascus.

The largest group of 590,000 moved along the Euphrates

toward Deir Zor.

Along the path between Aleppo and Deir Zor

deportees were dying at the rate of 500-600 a day.

The banks of the Euphrates were clogged

with slow moving multitudes.

I was finally approaching Deir Zor

on the lower Euphrates.

In 1915 this was an isolated desert village;

and a wilderness, a place of extinction,

a place of no return.

To this day, in the 21st Century,

Deir Zor is still branded on the Armenian soul

as "hell on Earth".

The dreaded outpost of the Ottoman Empire,

Deir Zor, has become in our day,

a thriving Syrian town.

Michael Hagopian found a few Armenians

still remained in Deir Zor.

He had to be cautious in seeking evidence

of the genocide of 1915.

Officials told Hagopian that they feared the Turks

could stop the flow of water to Syria

if the Syrians assisted him in the search for witnesses.

"You say events took place."

"Those events that occurred they came from Turkey,

"through the wilderness.

"But the Turk soldiers did not allow the Armenians

"to reach the Euphrates.

"Because they wanted to kill and starve them.

"Between the Euphrates and Khabour Rivers,

"is the wilderness of Deir Zor.

"The massacre took place there,the massacre of Deir Zor.

"10 kilometers from Deir Zor there is a small hill,

and beyond that is all a wilderness".

In 1916, Armenians who had survived

the death marches,

were forced into this forsaken desert prison.

This region became the dumping ground

of unwanted Armenians.

The largest massacres of the Armenian Genocide

took place in the concentration camps

of this desert triangle between the Euphrates

and Khabour rivers.

This hell hole region is commonly referred to

as the Deir Zor Desert.

192,000 were slaughtered out right

in the vicinity of Deir Zor.

At Sheddeh another 200,000 were killed

by sword and by fire in burning caves.

At Ras ul Ain convicts were let out of prison

to butcher 300,000 defenseless deportees,

old men, women and children.

German Consul Rossler reported:

"300 to 500 deportees are taken out

"of the concentration camp each day and butchered

"at a distance often kilometers from Ras ul Ain.

The corpses are then thrown into the river."

Nium Sukkar was an Arab boy

who witnessed the same events.

They were putting all the sick people

that couldn't walk or couldn't eat.

They were pouring gasoline on them

and burning them to death.

Not only this one ditch but I saw three, four

other ditches, all the same way.

Before hiding out in the basement of Hotel Baron,

in Aleppo, Aram Andonian had been a runaway refugee

in the Deir Zor region.

His greatest fear was that the Turks would deny

their crimes after the war.

Andonian's exhaustive research and field investigations

help us to understand the final horrific events

of the genocide.

He interviewed survivors.

He sketched in great detail the places of torture,

burning and death on the banks of the Euphrates River.

Others followed the documentation

started by Andonian.

They searched the deserts for bones

and surviving Armenians.

"The Armenians

"among them my father and other friends

"took some small trucks and went to gather the bones

in the desert."

They found the desert full of

bleached bones as far as the eye could see

on either side, strewn on the ground,

thousands of skeletons.

"I saw the bones with my own eyes,

and gathered them with the others."

"You also gathered them?"

"Yes, I also gathered them."

"How do we know these were Armenian bones?"

"There were no human bones there

because there are no Arabs there."

"Maybe they were animal bones."

"No, no, no, no, animal bones

are different from those of humans."

"Maybe they were the bones of Arabs?"

"There were no Arab bones there.

On this side of the river, there were no Arabs."

"Maybe the Armenians killed the Turks?"

"The Armenians killed the Turks?"

"Yes, maybe these were Turkish bones."

"Good question, but the Turkish soldiers

did not come here, nor was there a battle here,

to give the Armenians the opportunity

to massacre the Turks.

"When the caravans arrived, the Armenians were naked.

"Many men without anything to wear

"and the women barely able to conceal themselves.

People in that condition are not able to wage war."

Michael Hagopian was determined

to find survivors

who might still live in the remote deserts.

His film crew explored the region of Deir Zor

seeking evidence of the footprints

destitute Armenians had left in these alien Arab lands.

"Talk to us about the arrival of the Armenians

to Syria."

"They came the year of the genocide.

Some were adopted by the Arabs and some by the Kurds."

"And how did they arrive?"

"Some were massacred by the Turks,

and others were driven here."

"What was the number of the arrivals?"

"More than 2000, maybe 3000."

In small villages

I searched for eyewitness survivors

who had escaped the Turkish atrocities

and who were still living among the Arabs.

In the twilight I heard a voice in the distance

a woman singing in Armenian. It was an old woman.

Her name was Serpouhi.

She led me to the two other survivors

who still lived on the banks of the Euphrates.

Serpouhi had survived the long march to the desert.

She married an Arab, a Moslem man, a kind man,

who showered her with many gifts.

So that she would not forget her Armenian heritage,

Serpouhi had tattooed on her wrist

her family name, "Papazian", and the year "1915".

Serpouhi told me a horrible story

of how she was rounded up by Turkish soldiers

and driven into a cave at a place called Sheddeh.

She was stuffed into a burning furnace in the earth.

In that terrifying place was an Armenian boy

she had fallen in love with.

After their rescue, he was renamed Abdulla Garabed,

and married off to a Moslem girl.

Over the years the pain was softened;

Abdulla Garabed had given his daughter in marriage

to Serpouhi's son, hoping to carry on

their shared heritage.

"Were you alone when you came

or were there many of you?"

"We came till that bridge.

"Some of the caravans continued, but we stayed.

I was crying."

"Were you too many?"

"Oh, many, oh so many tents."

The final survivor of the fire lived in Sheddeh,

by himself in a hut on the horizon.

He was born in Zeitun, on the Armenian plateau.

He, also, had been cast into the underground cave

along with Serpouhi, Abdulla Garabed

and the other terrified children.

A little later Turkish women came into the cave and began

to shout, 'Infidels, do you have any children to sell?'

About 10 mothers, tears flowing down their cheeks,

stood up and holding their children's hands,

began to walk towards the Turkish women.

The children were sobbing.

The Turkish woman tried to buy the boy

from Zeitun.

He refused to leave his little sisters.

The opening to the cave was closed and a fire started.

Hundreds of helpless, sun stroked,

starving women and children

were locked in this dark chamber.

Only seven survived.

Three of them were still living when Hagopian arrived.

One was Serpouhi, one was Abdulla Garabed,

and the other was the boy from Zeitun.

The Arabs gave him a new religion and a new name.

They called him Mubarak.

He retains the most searing memory of the burning cave.

"They separated the old

"from the young,

"and they separated the males from the females.

"They placed us children in a cave, locked the opening

"with wood and burned the wood.

"The ones that were near the door and close to the fire

"were killed immediately,

"while the rest who were far from the fire,

"suffocated from the smoke.

"The survivors, I was one of them,

"remained 15 days without food or water.

"The cave was cold,and the heat from our exhaling

"and body formed moisture on the cave wall,

"we squeezed it to drink the water from it.

"After they left us, we dug the cave wall,

formed some type of stairs, and escaped."

Serpouhi had walked a 1000 miles,

all the way from Constantinople.

She had seen a 1000 deaths in the burning sands,

and in the waters of the Euphrates.

In her torment she unlocked for me the mystery

of the final survivors of Deir Zor.

To fill the void in her soul, she often sat on the banks

of this mighty river of death,

thinking of the old days.

The voices of her youth,the verses of the great poets,

still lingered in her heart.

"The ages pass, no tidings come.

"Eternal sorrow is my doom.

"Tell them I die of grief and tell how hope is dead

"within my heart.

"I am exiled from my ruined nest,

"and roam with faltering steps.

"When shall night end this day's last glimmering spark?

Where shall my weary feet tonight find rest?"

For me this was a long journey.

I do not know if my search is finished,

or if I have found all of the footprints

of those who survived.

I interviewed and filmed some 400 who had been

on the caravan trails along the Euphrates River.

I found survivors in many lands,

strangers to each other,

speaking in 13 different languages.

But they had one story to tell the world.

"We are all survivors of a simple truth

we saw a colossal genocide.

We witnessed it with our own eyes."