Original subtitles

This program was made possible

by generous contributions from the Bezikian family.

Additional support was provided by Dr. Noubar Ouzounian

and the Chitjian Foundation and viewers like you.

- My grandmother experienced the genocide

by her own eyes.

She was in Moush in 1915, in July,

when the Turkish soldiers shelled the city

and destroyed her working field,

destroyed her orphanage, destroyed her clinic.

- They come knock the door and took us out,

and we had to walk,

and they took my father early.

Only women and children left.

- All beautiful girls were victims of some kind, you know,

rape or theft or kidnapping.

My mother said that they would use mud to rub on the faces

of the beautiful women so they wouldn't look so attractive.

To try to look like they had sores on their face,

just to save them.

- My mother would talk about that all the time

and she would say in Armenian,

"Why did God do this?"

And she lost her faith.

"Orphans of the Genocide,"

the story of hundreds of thousands

of Armenian genocide orphans forgotten

in the pages of history.

On June 26, 2010 close to 2,000 Canadian citizens gathered

at the Cedarvale Park Community Center

for the official unavailing of the plaque

that designated the Georgetown Boys Farmhouse

as a historic and protected municipal site.

- Designated property 2010, Cedarvale Park.

In 1923 Cedervale Farm was a site

of Canada's first international

humanitarian resettlement effort,

rescuing orphans of the Armenian Genocide

that later became United Church Girl School,

Heritage Halton Hills.

- At the most crucial juncture of our history,

Canada saved these children.

This was not in fact a humanitarian action

in the ordinary sense of the word.

This was indeed a concrete expression

of Canada's commitment to justice and Human Rights.

Justice and Human rights,

two concepts or their lack of etched the destiny

of hundreds of thousands of parentless children.

Hundreds of thousands of orphans, Armenian orphans,

orphans of the genocide.

The year was 1915, the place Anatolia,

the persecutors were the Ottoman Authorities

and the target was the Ottoman citizens

of Armenian ancestry.

Summer of 1915 marked the first waves

of mass deportations that created scores

of Armenian orphans.

Within weeks, hundreds of thousands

of Armenian citizens were uprooted

from their ancestral villages

and put in temporary concentration camps.

- For the most part the men were gone,

having either been killed at the outset of the genocide

or conscripted into labor battalions

and were killed sometime later.

Women and children were of course organized into caravans,

sent on the road towards Der Zore for their relocation

and en route they fell victim.

Women were raped, their goods, their money was stolen

by their escorts or by people along the way.

Der Zore, a desert, located northeast

of present day Syria,

known for its harsh climactic characteristics,

200 millimeters average yearly rainfall,

scorching summer heat that generates frequent droughts,

bitter cold, sub-zero weather.

Talaat Pasha, the Interior Minister,

was well aware of the harsh conditions of Der Zore.

On July 6, 1914, during a parliamentary debate,

he refused to populate the area

with Turkish Albanian refugees.

About 10 months later,

he gave the orders to relocate the Armenian citizens

from Ottoman Turkey to Der Zore.

- Through each town or each city

that the Armenians would have passed through,

local people, Kurds, Muslims, Turks, Arabs

would have identified pretty girls or young boys

and would take them from the caravans

and integrate them into their own households,

sometimes as wives, sometimes as servants.

But they were taken as children

and their families would often go on to die.

Consequently, the banks

of the Euphrates River is dotted

with hundreds of mass graves.

To this day human remains can be easily found

in shallow mass graves and caves in Der Zore,

El-Raqqa, Ras El Ain and tens of other locations

all the way up to central Anatolia.

- My mother's story is really tragic.

She went through the whole thing in detail.

They lost their home, they were on foot.

They took with them only what they could carry.

No carts, no riding animals or anything.

And they were driven from their home in Govdoun, Sepastia,

all the way across the Iraqi dessert

to Ourfa

and Mosul.

And then during the trip they were bare foot all the way,

across the hot dessert sands.

And her feet were slightly disformed

because of that but not bad.

On the way, of course,

there were women and children and old men,

who couldn't resist the Ottoman power see,

and so they didn't massacre them right away.

My mother at the time was 15.

Her sister was a little younger and she was considered

to be the most beautiful girl in the village.

At least that's what Murad Pasha said

and he was from the same village.

So they took a special care

to make her look uglier than she was.

But it didn't work, I mean she died of illness,

she died of disease on the way.

My mother also lost her brother

who was tormented by Arab children.

They used to throw stones at them.

And he died also on the way.

And so did my mother's mother, my grandmother.

And she lost another sister

who was taken in by friendly Arabs

and after the war settled in Beirut.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian,

a former medical pathologist,

who spent a good part of his professional life entangled

in legal battles with the U.S. Supreme Court,

protecting the rights of the terminally ill

to choose voluntary euthanasia,

was the son of an Armenian Genocide orphans.

- This bothered me growing up.

I didn't really have any hatred for the Turks,

my mother never showed outright hatred

and she could talk even with Turkish people

without any kind of emotion and I always admired that.

My sister couldn't stand that.

My younger sister was more vengeful than my mother.

My mother, I think, was wiser.

But because of that,

I can speak with Turks and not hate them,

because they didn't do it,

that was the Ottomans who did it,

although that's the same people.

Although he never thought of himself

as an artist, Dr Kevorkian's paintings reflect

a profound sense of distaste towards injustice.

In this painting entitled "1915 Genocide 1945,"

using his own blood as red paint,

he depicted the horrors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide

and The Jewish Holocaust of 1945.

- I am a historian of the Holocaust

and I think about what happened to Jewish children caught

in the net of Nazism and I think too about what happened

to Armenian children who were caught

in the grip of this genocide.

For me their experiences are absolutely similar,

far more similar than different.

Both groups of children suffered

irrevocable loss.

Both groups of children were targeted for reasons

which they didn't understand

and which indeed are not understandable.

- No Armenian males remained in Kayseri except

for a few feeble elderly men and boys under the age of 15.

The able bodied mostly intellectuals had been gathered,

jailed and then slain

in what came to be known as Slaughter Valley.

90 year old Mae Derderian,

the author of "Vergeen,"

based on the memoirs of Vergeen Kalenderian,

a close family friend who was a genocide orphan.

Vergeen's story is a testament to the plight

of a typical teenaged Armenian orphaned girl

during the genocide.

- Vergeen's father had died before the deportation began,

so it was just she and her mother.

They started out from the city of Kayseri

and joined other people in their neighborhoods

in other cities and then took that journey,

that awful journey,

through the various villages and cities southward

and eventually ended up in Aleppo, Syria,

but a lot went on in between.

While stillin the deportation route,

a Bedouin horseman abducts Vergeen

and drags her mother along.

- When they got to where the Bedouin's family was,

I guess the decision was made

that they were gonna kill the mother

and keep the daughter.

And so the second day

that she was there they did indeed kill the mother

by drowning her and taking her clothes

and giving it to Vergeen.

So at the age of 13,

she became an orphan in the hands of the Bedouins.

Her captors treat Vergeen as a slave,

assigning her difficult house chores,

while she endured abuse and rape,

and living with the tribe's livestock.

A few months later, Vergeen is tattooed

as an Arab Bedouin woman.

- And she was interviewed on radio

and the reporter said to her,

"Why do you have your marks on your forehead

"and your chin and your mouth?"

And she said, "I," in English, perfect English,

"I was captured by the Bedouins

"during the Armenian Genocide."

Eventually she manages to flee

and finds a job at a military hospital

where she meets Nartouhy, Mae Derdarian's mother.

The two become lifelong friends.

At the end of World War I they move to Aleppo

together with Nartouy's mother.

Vergeen finds a teaching job

at an orphanage housing 2,500 Armenian Genocide orphans.

- Just outside of Aleppo,

these Armenian refugees were living in tents.

My mother and my grandmother were in one tent.

And right next to them was a tent of children.

Infants and toddlers, about 50 of them.

Crying, wailing, no one to take care of them.

My grandmother tried to walk over to the tent

and enter it to take care of these children

and she was beaten badly by the gendarmes.

Those kids died one by one with no one looking after them.

My mother used to,

it makes me cry,

my mother would talk about that all the time

and she would say, in Armenian,

"Why did God do this"?

And she lost her faith.

It's pretty hard to look at babies, infants

without parents and toddlers with no one to look after them.

No one to give them water or food, or change their diapers,

and those children died one by one, 50 orphans.

In 1921, Armen Meghrouni of Milwaukee,

the son of a family friend from Vergeen's birthplace,

arranged her immigration to America as his fiancé,

hoping to start a family with the woman

he had fallen in love with as a young man.

It was Vergeen's wish to have her tattoos removed,

to rid herself once and for all

of the constant reminders of the horrific memories

of her life as an Armenian Genocide orphan.

Her sons, Vahe and Victor made it their mission

to grant their mother's wish

and were successful in finding a medically safe solution

to erase Vergeen's tattoos

from her the forehead, lips and chin.

Sabiha Gokcen, the first woman pilot in Turkey,

was the adopted daughter of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,

the first president of Turkey.

To this day, Sabiha Gokcen remains

as an iconic figure and a symbol of Turkish womanhood

who was not only the first female pilot,

but also the first female combat pilot.

One of Sabiha's missions was the Dersim Operation of 1938,

when her squadron was assigned

to bomb the Kurdish populated region of Dersim.

This operation cost tens of thousands of innocent lives.

During the Genocide of 1915,

large numbers of Armenians took refuge

in Dersim disguised as Kurds.

A 2004 US State Department report states, quote:

In February, the "Hurriyet" newspaper's publication

of a report that Sabiha Gokcen,

an adopted daughter of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,

who was the country's first female pilot,

was of Armenian descent drew a number

of racist public statements, unquote.

The "Hurriyet" report was based

on an article written in 2004

by Hrant Dink and published

in the "Agos" Armenian newspaper in Istanbul, Turkey.

The article revealed

that Sabiha Gokcen's real name was Hatun Sebilisian,

an Armenian orphan of the genocide

and the daughter of Dirouhi and Nerses Sebilisian

whose father, Nerses, was killed during the 1915 Genocide.

In 1925, while living in an orphanage in Cibin,

Hatun Sebilisian was adopted

by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, President of Turkey.

The publication of the article created an uproar

amongst government circles in Turkey.

Journalist Hrant Dink was labeled a traitor

for unveiling Sabiha Gokcen's secret

which was based on a first account testimonial

from Sabiha's niece, Huripsimeh Ghazaryan.

Sabiha's Armenian ancestry has long been a common knowledge

among the Armenians.

This is an article, published in August of 1970,

in an Armenian magazine discussing the secrets

of Ataturk's daughter.

This, and similar articles penned

by the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink,

sparked a series of hate mail and threats against his life.

In 2007, Dink was assassinated in Istanbul, Turkey

when a gunman shot him in broad daylight

in front of his office building.

Dink's funeral procession united

the Armenian and Turkish citizens

in what is believed to be one the largest funerals

ever held in modern Turkey.

At his funeral, 200,000 mourners marched

in protest of the assassination, chanting,

"We are all Armenians" and "We are all Hrant Dink."

In 2009, Turkey's second largest airport

in Istanbul was named after Sabiha Gokcen.

The first waves of Ottoman atrocities

against the Armenians started

before the 1915 Armenian Genocide.

Ottoman Emperor, Abdul Hamid II,

34th sultan of the Ottoman Empire,

ordered the massacres of tens of thousands of Armenians,

becoming known as the infamous Red or Bloody Sultan.

These atrocities, which started as early as 1892

and culminated in the massacres of Adana,

left an estimated 50,000 Armenian orphans in Anatolia.

In 1909, an orphan

who survived the Adana massacres,

found herself at the doorsteps

of the Hadjin Orphanage wrapped in this dress.

In 1914, when the orphanage was uprooted in haste,

sister Dorinda Bowman managed to bring this dress with her

to all the way from Hadjin to the United States.

The dress retains it's original dirt to this date.

In 1908, two sisters, Rose and Nora Lambert

of the Mennonite Brethren Missionaries

took an arduous journey from New York to Hadjin

by way of Mersin, Turkey and founded two orphanages,

one in Hajin for girls and one in Everek for boys.

This mission, perched at the hilltops of Hadjin,

housed 306 orphans

that survived the Hamidian massacres between 1894 and 1896.

In her 1911 published memoirs,

"Hadjin and the Armenian Massacres"

Rose Lambert reassures a group of widow and orphan survivors

of her sincere commitment to their security.

"If the blood of 20 thousand innocent Armenians is shed

"it will make very little difference

"if the blood of one American is mingled with it".

Later, during the Genocide of 1915 through 1918,

both orphanages were torched down to rubbles

by the Ottoman Turks.

At least five American missionaries,

including Reverend Henry Maurer, lost their lives

while caring for the Armenian orphans of Hadjin.

- My name is Jussi Flemming Bioern, my father was Armenian.

His name was Rafael Safarian.

He was adopted by a Norwegian missionary,

Bodil Katharina Biorn from Karagida.

He was brought to Norway and he grew up.

He later was taken down

to the Middle East

to live with my grandmother.

Bodil Biorn was

a young Norwegian missionary nurse

who came from a very affluent family.

In 1905, Bodil chose to leave her posh life behind

and dedicate her life to the Armenian orphans.

After serving in Constantinople, present day Istanbul,

and Marash in Western Armenia until 1907,

she requested to be transferred to Moush.

- My grandmother experienced the genocide by her own eyes.

She was in Moush in 1915, in July

when the Turkish soldiers shelled the city

and destroyed her working field, destroyed her orphanage,

destroyed her clinic and she had to flee.

She had to flee for her life

and she lost her children in the orphanage,

she lost the girls that she had educated and helped so much.

Bodil Biorn writes the following caption

on the verso of this photo.

"In this image, the teacher Margarid Nalbanchian

"and most of the 120 children

"of the day school were murdered in 1915."

In 1917 she adopts a 1 1/2-year-old Armenian orphan

named Rafael Safaryan of Constantinople,

and takes him back with her to Norway,

where she raises funds for orphan relief work

only to return to Armenia one year later

to serve in Alexandrapol, Armenia, present day Gyumri.

- There she rented a big house

and started all over again with a new orphanage

this time for boys and she opened a clinic, a public clinic.

She was a trained nurse.

She had experience as a doctor even though she was not,

but she had experience in surgery,

in dental work, all what was necessary.

In 1922, Bodil had to flee Armenia once more,

this time under pressure from Soviet Authorities

and continue her orphan relief work in Aleppo, Syria.

99 years after Bodil Biorn's first visit

to historic Armenia, her grandson Jussi Fleming Bioern,

the son of the adopted orphan Rafael Safaryan,

produces a documentary about Bodil Biorn's life.

- We traveled to Turkey, eastern Turkey,

we traveled to Moush.

We traveled to Armenia and we traveled to Syria

and shot the film in three parts.

This was in 2006 and 2007.

And used the rest of 2007

and the spring of 2008 to edit and make the film.

Arshile Gorky, considered a seminal figure

in the abstract art movement that transformed American art,

was born Vosdanik Adoian near Lake Van.

On June 16, 1915, at the height of the genocide, Gorky,

along with his three sisters and mother, Shushan Adoian,

joined a death march caravan heading north east

for 150 miles.

30 days later, they arrived in Yerevan,

present day Armenia's capital city.

Soon after their arrival,

Gorky's mother died of starvation in his arms.

- Arshile Gorky's a really an interesting story

in terms of having lost his mother

and of what he became once he came to the United States.

He and his sisters, lead by his mother fled the genocide.

They fled to Van City for a while,

then they ended up in and around Yerevan.

There was so little food because of Turkish blockades

of Armenia at the time,

so many people were dying of starvation and disease

and his mother would give

whatever food she could to the children,

particularly to Gorky because he was her only son.

Eventually she basically starved to death.

And the story in the family is that she basically starved

to death in his arms and eventually,

through the help of family friends,

they made it to the United States in 1920.

One of the two versions of Gorky's famous,

"The Artist and His Mother" is on permanent exhibit

at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

The inspiration for both paintings was

the only photo Gorky had of himself

and his mother taken just before the start of the genocide.

- People actually stand in front of that painting

and they weep, they weep, because they get the emotionality,

they get what happened to Gorky,

and they get what happened to her.

And they see their mothers' face

who they lost in the genocide maybe in that painting,

because he has spent so much time trying

to get an overall sense of the mood

or that kind of atmosphere of that painting,

without having created a work that is so individual.

It's a very Armenian looking face

and, yes, it looks like his mother

but it also looks like a lot of Armenian faces.

Faces of Armenian women that you see

in the pictures of the genocide.

Old pictures of the way life used to be in the old country.

And so I think that that's a huge thing

that kind of resonates for people.

- An artist is like a blender.

Everything that happens to you as an artist,

as a human being goes into that blender.

You read a fantastic book,

you listen to some fascinating music,

you fall in love and war goes in there

and of course genocide, genocide.

And so you process everything, that blender works

and you spew it out.

In Gorky's case, in Gorky's case it's fascinating,

because his processor has worked so well

that it's almost impossible to detect

which is which, what's what.

But it's there.

It's impossible that it won't be there.

Harutune Galents was four years old

when his affluent family in Sepastia was deported

after the disappearance of his father.

Upon their arrival to relative safety in Aleppo, Syria,

his mother died of exhaustion

sending the four brothers into an orphanage.

Harutune Galents,

who's been through the journey

of orphanhood and who was a typical Armenian man,

who has gone through the dreadful genocide was able

to battle life through his art

by affirming that I exist, we exist.

Harutune's artistic talents were apparent

from an early age in the orphanage.

Upon graduating from the orphanage school,

he settled in Beirut, Lebanon where he excelled as an artist

and in 1939 received the Medal of Merit

at the New York International Exhibition.

In 1943, he married his apprentice Armine Baronian,

and in 1946 repatriated to Armenia with his family

where he died at the peak of his career in 1967.

Every time he mentioned the genocide

he would go to his room and weep,

but he wouldn't discuss it except with his family.

He would talk about his experiences during the genocide.

How his mother rubbed their faces

with dirt to disguise them.

How they witnessed the killings on the track.

How human bodies would float in the river for weeks.

He would tell us that in tears.

But none of his paintings depict the Armenian tragedy.

The contrary, what they do is celebrate life.

Although Galents' paintings

have vibrant, cheerful colors,

his melancholic portraits reflect eyes

that resonate the despondence of a tortured soul.

The fear in Nuvart's face, the horror in Markarid's eyes,

the destitute in their mother's vision

and the hesitant grip of her newborn child.

In 1899, after the murder of her husband

during the Hamidian massacres she walked nearly 100 miles

from the town of Keghi to Harput

with her three fatherless children in tow

and in search of food and shelter.

The 105 year old, Almas Boghossian,

once an Armenian Genocide orphan as Almas Avakian,

now lives in Whitensville, Massachusetts.

She was eight years old when the Turkish soldiers evicted

her family from their ancestral home,

to join thousands of other Armenian refugees

in what became the starvation march

to the desert of Der Zore.

Almas is the only survivor

of the Avakian Family of Harput province.

- I remember but, well,

they come knock the door

and took us out and we had to walk.

And they took my father early.

Only women and children left.

They killed them, my mother and my father

and we walked and walked.

Some of them dying.

Kids were left alone, new born kids.

It's awful, I don't want to even remember them.

- And as best as we can figure

she really went most of the way from Hussenig to Der Zore

on foot with her family

and she was the only one them that survived.

Her younger sister died very early along the way,

along the route, roughly following the Euphrates River.

The march to Der Zore passed

through Ras El Ain, a major processing

and annihilation center for the Armenian deportees

along the deportation route.

- She remembers going into a store in Souare with her mother

and she remembers the mother speaking

to the Syrian owner of the store.

They were speaking in Turkish

and that it was sort of an excited conversation

and it went on for sometime.

My grandmother became tired after a while

and fell asleep in the store.

What was happening was that my great-grandmother was trying

to convince the store owner to adopt my grandmother.

- I was in a Arabic house.

They adopted me, they were a very good family.

They said whoever have Armenian kid,

they should bring them to government house.

- The relief agencies were making a plea

for Syrian families that had adopted Armenian orphans

to return those orphans to the relief agencies.

- They took us there and that was my second home.

You know I was small and little by little

I started to love them and that's it.

They brought us to the orphanage in Aleppo Syria.

- She remembers food was scarce in the orphanage.

And she would sometimes reserve her food.

She would eat just enough so that she wasn't hungry anymore

and hide the rest of it in various places.

- We wake up in the morning, we all sleeping one room.

About 20, 30 little by little.

They feed me so we not die.

Starving, we were starving.

Each one is very thin because no food.

This much bread and soup, little.

- One day while she was in the orphanage,

she made contact through the gate of the orphanage.

There were other children outside, street children

and sometimes she was able to talk to them

through the orphanage gates.

She was on the inside, they were on the outside

and one of them was her older sister,

whom she had not seen in several years,

since the time of the deportation.

She remembers passing some of the food

out to her older sister

and her older sister told her

that the very day after her mother gave her

to be adopted by the store owner,

the next day her mother died.

A few weeks later, the street children,

also known as the roaming Armenian orphans,

were no longer begging at the gates of the orphanage.

A rumor soon spread that the Ottoman gendarmes,

annoyed by the children had assembled and killed them all.

Among the disappeared was Almas Avakian's older sister.

She remembers it was a difficult life there.

They taught the orphans to do various tasks.

They would have to help out in the orphanage.

Some of them, like my grandmother, were taught

how to make Armenian lace.

- I learned this in orphanage.

This is made by sewing needle.

Not crochet, sewing needle.

- That's something that my grandmother has remembered

all of her life.

She has made very beautiful Armenian lace

and a few years ago taught my daughter,

her great-granddaughter, how to do the lace.

So now my daughter knows how to do that very well.

In 1920, Almas Avakian's aunt,

living in Massachusetts,

discovers that Almas was still alive

and immediately claims her from the Aleppo orphanage

and pays for her passage to America.

- My aunt had seven children.

Her husband made $25.

And she bring me here.

That cost them perhaps, three, $400 for me to come here.

And later she married me.

And then I had my children.

And that's life, that's life.

Almas Bogossian is considered

to be one of the lucky Armenian Genocide orphans

who survived the horrors and atrocities of the genocide.

Living in America, 5,000 miles away from her ancestral home

of Western Armenia where she was driven out of,

Almas started a family and raised three children

who went on to complete post graduate education.

She lived to enjoy her eight grandchildren

who made her a proud great grandmother of six.

- The number of orphans was so large,

that they would become really the basis

of the new Armenian society

in places like Aleppo and in Beirut.

Armenian relief was an incredibly important aspect

of America's relationship with the Middle East

and entire organizations,

Near East Relief being the most important one,

but also the International Red Cross,

that Americans were at the forefront

of providing relief to Armenian victims of genocide.

Robert Elliot Wirt Junior,

a U.S. Special Forces Green Beret who has served his country

in Central America,

is the great, grandson of congregational minister,

Loyal Lincoln Wirt who started a worldwide campaign

for Near East Relief fundraisers

for genocide stricken Armenians in Ottoman Turkey.

- At the end of the First World War,

Loyal had been a captain in the American Red Cross

in the European theater and he came back to America,

was recruited by Dr. Barton

of the Congregational Mission there,

to head up a relief effort to Turkey,

which was being gathered under the auspices

of Near East Relief, which is a church relief group

that was set up and was chartered and authorized

by the U.S. Congress at about that time,

under Woodrow Wilson.

Loyal Lincoln Wirt was commissioned

to lead the first shipment of relief supplies

from New York to Constantinople, Turkey

aboard the vessel SS Pensacola.

The 10,000 ton vessel set sail on January 25, 1919,

carrying 100 automobiles,

scores of necessary relief equipment and supplies

and a group of 48 American volunteers.

Loyal's mission marked the beginning

of Near East Relief's herculean task.

- They built, according to Loyal,

approximately 212 orphanages from Istanbul to Aleppo

down in Syria.

And these were operated for a number of years

until the children eventually gathered together

approximately according to again Loyal's writings,

approximately 200,000 children,

the Armenian orphans which were left behind

after their parents were had been murdered

by the Ottoman Turks, during the war.

And they were fed, clothed, educated

and all of these locations that the Near East Relief set up

for the Armenian orphanages,

were under the protection of the U.S. government,

and it didn't really take apparently,

the posting of the troops,

just the flying of the flag that the Turks would leave

these locations alone and leave the Armenian orphans

to their salvation in the orphanages.

In his memoirs, the "World is my Parish,"

Loyal writes how he witnessed the arrest

of Ismael Hakki Bey in Karahisar

while transporting Armenian refugees to Aleppo.

- "Ismael Bey was the Turkish Director of Deportations

"at Aleppo, before the city was captured by the British.

"Before their arrival he fled into the interior.

"The regimental interpreter was standing near him

"and I asked him what the crowd was saying.

"He replied that their language

"was more forcible than elegant,

"but not more so than the old scoundrel deserved.

"One was crying, 'Look at me, look at me,

"'you have not forgotten me,

"'I am the man who paid you 600 pound sterling at Mersin,

"'you promised me exemption

"'and then you deported me to the desert.'

"Another shouted, 'You called yourself protector.

"'You said pay me and I will save you and we believed you.

"'We paid you plenty

"'then you sent 40,000 of us to the desert.

"'Most of us died of disease and starvation.

"Still others heaped maledictions

"on the prisoners in the head.

"'You sent 300 orphans to a train,

"'saying they were going to a happy orphanage.

"'Then you set fire to that train and the children perished.

"'You though you left no witness

"'but I escaped to accuse you.'

"Ismael Hakki Bey had a fair trial,

"but the evidence against him was overwhelming.

"The verdict was execution by hanging.

"But as a military officer he was privileged to be shot.

Child star actor, Jackie Coogan,

who played an orphan

in Charlie Chaplin's 1921 silent movie "The Kid,"

was commissioned by the American Near East Relief Foundation

in 1924 to embarked on what became to be known

as the the World's first celebrity

humanitarian fundraising campaign.

Coogan's fundraiser for the Armenian Genocide orphans

was endorsed by the dairy product giant Nestle

and raised $1 million for providing necessary food supplies.

In this rare film, Jackie Coogan visits Detroit, Michigan

as one of his stops for his fundraiser

and eventually in October of 1924 travels

across the Atlantic to deliver the humanitarian shipment

to Armenian and Greek orphans in Athens.

Jackie Coogan was honored by His Holiness Pope Pius XI,

who in 1922 had saved 400 Armenian Genocide orphan girls

from Constantinople bringing them safety

to the city of Castel Gandolfo in Rome.

During a 1923 visit to Jerusalem,

Emperor Hailee Selassie of Ethiopia was so very impressed

by the performance of a brass band

that when he was informed

that its members were orphans

of the Armenian Massacres, he offered to adopt them all

and brought them back with him to Addis Ababa.

Soon, the 40 Armenian orphans formed

the Imperial Band of Ethiopia.

And their conductor, Kevork Nalbandian,

composed the Ethiopian National anthem.

In 1931, at the emperor's coronation,

the brass band refused to play the Turkish Anthem

as the Turkish delegation arrived.

"They killed our fathers how can we play their anthem?"

the band members reasoned.

One of the largest Armenian Orphan relief initiatives

launched by the American Near East Relief Foundation,

was the management

of the world's largest genocide orphan relief

in the city of Alexandrapole,

modern day city of Gyumri, in Armenia.

- Alexandrapole was the place

for mass concentration of orphanages.

That's why the main three orphanages

in Alexandrapole were called Orphan Cities.

One of the orphanages

in Alexandrapole was housed in 75 such stone buildings,

once used as Russian Imperial barracks.

About 90 years ago,

thousands of Armenian orphans assembled in this field,

for their daily exercise routine.

22,000 Armenian orphans were cared for by American,

European and Armenian relief workers in Alexandrapole.

- We have hundreds of photos shot

by Near East Relief personnel showing

what kind of humanitarian activity,

orphan care activities were organized

in Alexandrapole, in 1920's.

The orphanage had its own hospital operated

by trained medical staff with scores of medical doctors

and nurses providing professional patient care.

They even had their own ambulatory system

for patient transportation.

In addition to academic education,

the Armenian children were trained

in the arts, crafts and trades.

The orphanage had its own musical bands

and organized concerts as well as theatrical groups

that put on performances.

While older girls helped out in the kitchen

and attended embroidery classes,

the boys learned about gardening,

shoemaking and auto-mechanics.

One of the children, a 14-year-old orphan,

built a small automobile that really operated.

Both, boys and girls were taught to knit

their own winter stockings for the harsh Caucasian weather.

They were also taught to mend their own clothing,

but still found time for play.

Even the nurses took respite from their hectic schedule.

In 1920, Vahan Cheraz, a native of Constantinople,

founded the first Armenian athletic

and scouting organization in Alexandrapole.

The group organized soccer teams, athletics programs,

and many other sports competitions involving the orphans.

All necessary measures were taken

to make the Armenian Genocide orphans feel at home.

They were provided toys, allowed to have pets,

they even had an outdoor hair salon.

And were showered with motherly love and care.

Alexandrapole was the capital

of Shirak Province in Armenia.

The Governor, Garo Sassouni was very instrumental

in the Armenian Genocide orphan relief efforts.

- My father, along with other duties was able

to save many orphans

by paying Kurds

delivering the orphans to their organization.

That's where you will find a group of orphans

with my mother Leyola Sassouni,

doing some physical exercises

on one of the hills of Khunous.

Garo Sassouni's wife, Leyola Sassouni,

a graduate of the American Robert College

in Constantinople served as the administrative translator

for Near East Relief in Alexandrapole.

- My father was also instrumental

in bringing large

segment of the population

of Daron, Van, Erzunga and Alashgerd

to Eastern Armenia

and many orphans were walking

with about 100,000 or some say about 300,000 population

from that region to Eastern Armenia

and primarily through Alexandrapole.

Later, the Sassuni's continued

their orphan relief efforts

in Aleppo, Syria and Beirut, Lebanon.

Today, one of the chapter of the Armenian Relief Society,

based in Watertown, Massachusetts,

is named after Leyola Sassouni.

- The rescue movement was an attempt

to locate, find and retrieve these young people,

who now in many cases had gone through adolescence

and were adults, who wanted to be found

and wanted to come back to the Armenian community.

It wasn't just that international organizations

that did this of course,

the first and most important rescues were affected

by Armenians themselves.

The AGBU, Armenian General Benevolent Union,

established in 1906 in Cairo, Egypt

and the ARS, Armenian Relief Society,

at times referred to as the Armenian Red Cross,

established in New York, in 1910, played a momentous role

in locating and rescuing Armenian orphans

including those who were forcefully converted into Muslims,

or roaming aimlessly in the Syrian dessert,

and still others who were adopted

by friendly Muslim families.

Both organizations were instrumental

in providing the genocide orphans

with desperately needed physical, mental and spiritual care

by starting soup kitchens, clinics, kindergartens,

workshops, skill centers and Bible schools.

Armenian organizations and church groups collaborated

in administering scores of orphanages

in Constantinople, Eastern Anatolia, Jerusalem,

Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and many other locations,

with financial assistance from United States,

Europe and as far as Australia and Japan.

Mampre and Myriam Shirinian,

who look like

an average hard-working Canadian immigrant couple

in this photo, were in fact two Armenian orphans

of the genocide, who met and started a family

thousands of miles away from their ancestral homeland.

Mampre was a Georgetown boy

and Myriam was a Georgetown girl.

- The Georgetown Boys endeavor was very important.

The Armenian Relief Association of Canada

raised public funds and these funds were raised

for the Armenian children.

The purpose was to bring these children to Canada,

to settle them on a farm home school

in Ontario, and to maintain those children,

each of those children, for five years.

In 1924, Mampre Shirinian was brought

to Georgetown Boys Farmhouse

in Cedervale, Ontario, Canada,

by the efforts of the Armenian Relief Association of Canada.

- He remembers his father who was taken away

in a labor battalion and killed,

before the genocide started.

Miryam Mazmanian from Harput, Turkey,

orphaned at the age of two and her brother were also brought

to Canada by way of Corfu, Greece.

- She remembers the day that her brother came running to her

as she was playing in the yard outside her home.

Grabbed her by the hand and pulled and said,

"Run, the soldiers are coming."

She never saw home or parents again.

My dad told me a recollection

of when he was on the deportations.

He remembers, his brother, Kevork,

after whom I'm named, dying of pneumonia.

- And my father having lost everybody,

moved from family to family

and he would join with other orphaned boys

when they'd pass through a town.

And one trick they would have,

they'd do go to the local granary

and they would pretend to get in a fight,

and they would throw each other on the grain pile

and stuff their pockets full of grain

that they would take back to the mother

who was looking after them

and this would allow her to make some food or some bread.

- A group of Turkish soldiers saw him begging for food,

recognized him as an Armenian and called him over

and said they'll give him food

if he let them circumcise him

and convert him into Muslim on the spot.

In 1936, Mampre, a Georgetown boy

and Miryam, a Georgetown girl get married

and settle in Ontario, Canada, start a business,

raise two sons Lorne and George,

who both excelled as academicians.

Sarkis Sarkissian was another Georgetown boy

who lost his parents in 1915 in Harput at age two.

His grandmother took custody of Sarkis and his sister Nuver,

but as her health began to fail

she turned the children over to an orphanage.

- His grandmother put him and his sister

in an orphanage in Adana,

and they stayed there for two to three years,

then they were taken to the island of Cyprus

to another orphanage and they were there

for another two years,

and then they were shipped to the Greek Island of Corfu.

Eventually Sarkis was separated

from his sister, Nuver, and taken to Canada

as a Georgetown boy where he excelled

in agricultural husbandry.

- It's probably be this field right here,

was all wet and marshy.

And they gave the boys each a plot,

and they had to tile drain this, this land.

I'm sure if you dug down,

you'd probably find the tiles are still here.

Each boy had to dig a certain amount of trench,

to put the tiles in to drain this field

and each had a plot where they could grow a garden.

Upon leaving Georgetown,

Sarkis started a farming business,

and after meeting Ann Popiel,

a Canadian of Ukrainian descent, started a family.

In 1938, Sarkis received word that his sister Nuver,

the only family relation was alive and well,

and employed as a nurse at the Scot Mission Hospital

in Tiberias, Palestine.

Sarkis contacts Nuver immediately

and soon she joins him in Canada.

- After letters and going

through different political channels and all that stuff,

he finally got her permission to come to Canada.

And I can remember what we used to be called Multon Airport

and she came in on this big Tristar,

motor driven airplane and she got off the plane

and well it was a very,

sorry, but a very emotional reunion.

After settling in Toronto,

Nuver met and married Levon Vassoyan another Georgetown boy.

- I can remember going to her wedding

and another one of the Georgetown boys was their best man

and his name was Mampre Shirinian.

- There was a moment in Georgetown

when the zeal to make the young orphans Canadians rapidly

perhaps went a little too far.

- So when the Armenian Relief Association of Canada

changed the names of those children,

anglicized them in the name of their sponsors,

that was the connection.

The sponsors had given certain amounts of money

and were gonna continue that kind of money

for these children and it was at that point

that the children objected to having their names changed,

because that was the only thing

they came with was their names.

- So they told the boys, they had a meeting and said,

"We're gonna change your names,"

and they even drew a list of what their names would be.

For example, my father Mampre Shirinian,

they said he was going to be Paul Oliver

and my father shook his head

and there was no rhyme or reason

to why it should be Paul Oliver and they were similar cases.

The boys in effect revolted.

- And all these young boys gathered together

and made a delegation to the leadership of the orphanage

and they begged to be able

to keep their original Armenian names.

They did not want to appear ungrateful

but, they said these names have no meaning to us.

But we've lost our mothers,

our fathers and friends and home.

Please let us keep our Armenian names.

- And in this way the administrators relented

and the boys were allowed to keep their names.

A memory of their parents they never saw again.

- I have mixed emotions of sadness,

because the Georgetown Boys Farm had to be established

and was established to look after 109 orphans of boys

and 29 orphan girls that had to come to a new land,

who knew nothing about the language or the culture,

but were put in the position that they were in.

But I have mixed emotions of celebration today,

because they were survivors

and this picture right here in front of all of us,

in any future printings of a dictionary

besides the word survivor,

every dictionary should have a picture

of the Georgetown Boys.

On June 27, 2011,

the provincial plaque was erected at the site

by the Ontario Heritage Trust,

further immortalizing the memory

of the 109 Armenian Genocide orphans rescued

by the Canadian relief efforts marking this

as Canada's first ever humanitarian undertaking of its kind.

A recently uncovered authentic Ottoman document,

issued on August 30, 1915,

dispatched by the Ottoman Interior Ministry

to the vice governor of Ankara, reads as follows:

The existence of Armenian children

in official institutions is not appropriate.

Therefore, the remaining ones should be divided

among Islamic villages.

Signed Interior Minister, Talat.

According to another document,

issued on September 22, 1915, dispatched in Ankara,

and signed by deputy governor Atef,

1,426 Armenian children were ordered

to be absorbed by Islamic Institutions.

- 1,450 orphans in Ankara, today's capital of Turkey,

back, right after the genocide,

according to Ottoman documents written

by Turkish government officials, that we have access to now.

According to those documents,

those 1,450 Armenian kids, young kids, were taken

and then distributed,

sent over to various Islamic institutions

the document says and as a result of course

when little, young kids are taken over

by Islamic institutions,

they are raised as Muslims, as Turks.

If you send an Armenian kids to an Islamic institution,

obviously the intent is to Islamize them,

so you also prove not only the act

but you prove the intent of the act,

the objective, the end result

of the act is to Islamize them.

- Under all international human rights laws,

which of course are frequently not obeyed,

to take a person out of their community

and turn them into another person is a crime

against humanity and is in deed an act of genocide

and the United Nations' documentation clearly shows that.

- Taking away Armenian children from families

and putting them either in orphanages

or within Turkish families and to assimilate them

into Islamic culture, into Turkish culture,

was a very structural element

and very important part of the genocidal process.

- What was happening was that, in effect,

the Turkish authorities were changing the identity

of Armenian children, who either had lost their parents

or whose parents were actually killed in the genocide

and these children were effectively being turned into Turks.

- Now they were in this very hostile environment

in the Turkish orphanages,

orphanages set up specially for collecting Armenian children

and Turkifying them.

And putting them through

a very strict regime of Turkification.

- Where they were, as was standard practice

in the Ottoman orphanages at that time,

if you were a Christian boy, you were circumcised

and given a Muslim name.

If you were an Armenian girl,

your name would have been changed to a Muslim name.

- And they forced them to become Muslim,

they were not allowed to speak Armenian.

They were often beaten, sometimes to death,

if they dared to maintained their Armenian identity.

- Armenian children between age five, six until 13,

gave them a wonderful opportunity,

because this was the age group that they thought

they could assimilate them easily

and then make them Turks.

- They strove to adopt themselves to this new environment,

but they weren't able to, because whatever they cherished,

their language, they heritage,

even small children was robbed out of them

and a new thing, something new was imposed on them.

- Ottoman authorities started

to implement these policies way before

they organized the actual deportations and killings.

They calculated that some

of the Armenian children would remain,

they won't be sent with their parents

and certain preparations were made

to keep these Armenian children either in form of orphanages

or in form of distributing them into Muslim families.

- We know that in Turkey itself, what is today Turkey,

there were orphanages opened for Turkish, and Kurdish,

in other words for Muslim orphans,

and as the genocide was unfolding,

the Turks also gathered Armenian orphans

and placed them in those Muslim orphanages,

and when you look at their statement after the war,

when certain parts of Anatolia were occupied

by the Allied Forces, the Turks began to say

that their mission was to shelter those Armenian orphans,

they did not differentiate

between an Armenian or a Christian and a Muslim.

- And when League of Nations observers would go

and visit those orphanages,

they would see list, long lists of names of Armenian kids,

Armenian children's names, Assadour, Hagop

that've been crossed out

and then replaced with Muslim names.

And so they understood that there was

a concerted, official, governmental process

to change Armenian children into Muslim Turkish children.

The result of one

of those concerted official governmental processes

was the creation of Antoura Orphanage spearheaded

by the commander of the 4th Ottoman Army, Ahmad Jemal Pasha.

- What Jemal Pasha was doing, in effect,

was killing the children's identity

by turning them into Turks.

Taking away their culture, their religion, their very names.

They were ceasing to exist as Armenians.

Probably not as cheap as killing them,

but mass killing in a place like Lebanon,

where it was a little bit more public

would have been more difficult.

Antoura, a small town nestled

between the cornucopia of the mediterranean turquoise

and the verdant pine forests of Mount Lebanon was

once home to 1,000 Armenian Genocide orphans

destined for Turkification.

Missak Kelechian, a silicon valley electrical engineer,

conducted thorough primary and secondary research

and was able to conclude that the building,

currently used by the Antoura Lazarite College in Lebanon

was once under the Ottoman rule

and a Turkification center for Armenian orphans.

- According to Antoura French College Archives,

there were 1,200 orphans.

200 of them being Kurds and Turks

and the rest, Armenian children.

There ages between three to 14 years old.

In March of 2010,

"The Independent" publishes an article penned

by the Award winning British journalist, Robert Fisk

under the title of "Living Proof of the Armenian Genocide."

In that article, Mr. Fisk provides details

of Mr. Kelechian's findings.

He describes how Mr. Kelechian was able

to trace a photo in a rare Book called, "Lions of Marash"

written by a Near East Relief officer, Stanley Kerr.

- This was the key element for my research,

because I looked for the French College of Antoura

in Lebanon and I did find the main entrance

and I was able to stand exactly

at the same spot where Jemal Pasha stood.

And it was an amazing discovery

to find the exact location where in 1916,

Commander of the Fourth Army in Syria, Jemal Pasha

with Halideh Edib, the director of the college

were standing side by side.

And here I am standing at the same exact position.

- What Missak did is, he found a location

and he found documents and he found photographs

and he put them all together.

So it became a real, a live issue.

You know, what was so significant about it is that,

you could talk to people who knew

where corpses of children were buried.

You could actually go to the place where they were buried.

You could see the church behind them.

You could the place where the Turks insisted

that Mouazin called the morning prayer

after Islamicizing the Christian college at Antoura.

According to journals

of the Lazarite fathers found at the Antoura orphanage,

the Turkification process called

for all male orphans to be circumcised.

All the orphans were taught the Turkish language

and cultural values in an effort

to strip them of their true cultural identity.

- Here again, we see a picture right at the entrance.

With lots of Turkish flags, all the Turkish dignitaries,

with Halideh Edib in the middle

and Fowzi Bey on her left hand side.

We also see flowers in front of the children,

trying to portray that this orphanage

was an excellent orphanage.

As you can see, both sides of the picture,

there are those arched windows

and right in the middle we can read 1898.

And here it is today, the same spot,

with the same windows and the entrance door

with the 1898 right on top of the arch.

Halideh Edib Adivar,

one the most prominent women of the Ottoman era,

was appointed the directress

of the orphanage by Jemal Pasha.

- Halideh Edib narrates in her autobiography

printed in 1926, that sometimes, in the middle of the meals,

when the children seamed happiest,

one of the little ones would suddenly begin to cry.

It was a screeching, cutting cry, which lasted for hours,

no doubt caused by some association with their home.

Also, that one felt that these children,

whatever happened would carry something cripple,

something mutilated in them.

Old archives found

in the library of Antoura College including photos,

handwritten documents and memorabilia prompted Mr Kelechian

to yet another discovery,

"The Memoirs of Karnig Panian,"

one of the orphans at the Antoura Orphanage.

- You see you can either kill a people

or you can totally take away their identity

and inject them with a new one,

which was what happening in Antoura.

And effectively you have killed them,

'cause you've killed their race,

you've killed their religion, you've killed their culture,

you've killed their name.

Of course, the children were treated so badly in Antoura

that some of them died there.

We know from actual survivors' accounts

that some of the children were going

and actually trying to grind up the bones

of other dead children who had died in the forest of hunger

and eat what was left of the bones to try to stay alive.

Almost a form of cannibalism.

That shows what happened.

Karnig Panian,

orphan number 551 was renamed Mahmoud.

He arrived at Antoura in 1916 at age six.

- When we were little, my sister and I,

during dinner or lunch time, when we didn't finish our food,

my father used to say,

"God will be unhappy with you,

"when I was a little boy, in the orphanage,

"there were days when I was obliged to grind bones

"and eat bones in order to survive.

"Sometimes grass."

And he said, "I didn't know if these bones were animal bones

"or the bones of my fellow orphans,

"because those who perished in that orphanage,

"they were thrown in a pit

"and at night animals used to come and eat their flesh."

In his memoirs, Mr. Panian writes:

At every sunset in the presence of over 1,000 orphans,

when the Turkish flag was lowered,

"Long Live General Pasha," was recited.

That was the first part of the ceremony.

- And after that it was time for punishing the children

for what they've done.

Which was daring to speak Armenian

or making any Christian references,

say by crossing their heart or stealing food to eat.

And all these acts were punishable by falakha.

Falakha, which a Turkish Ottoman way of punishment

by hitting the soles of the punished individual

using an iron rod or a stick.

They tied the feet of the victim to a stick,

which was held up by two individuals

and the third one would strike the soles of the victim

using an iron rod to inflict maximum pain.

In this case the victims were children

aged three, four, five, and sometimes 10 years old,

who would call for their dead mothers in unbearable pain.

Out of the 1,000 Armenian children

at Antoura Orphanage, only 456 survived.

Hundreds died as a result

of deplorable conditions at the orphanage.

The remains of over 300 orphans were discovered

in 1993 when the Lazarite fathers began construction

for new classrooms.

The remains found in the foundation of the college,

were moved to a mass grave on the grounds

of the college cemetery, unmarked, carrying no epitaph.

In September of 2010, through the efforts

of the KOHAR Ensemble

and its benefactor the Khatchadourian family,

a special monument was erected at the Antoura cemetery

in memory of the 300 Armenian orphans.

The monument is topped by a replica of the crown donned

by the last Armenian King Levon V.

Underneath the crown lies

the Cilician Armenian coat of Arms, the roaring lion.

It represents a symbolic posthumous inauguration,

honoring the 300 Armenian Genocide orphans

as Armenian kings.

Nearly 2,000 community members and dignitaries gathered

for the inauguration of the site

to pay respect to the souls of the 300 Armenian orphans.

A special requiem service,

officiated the opening of the monument followed

by a special performance of Armenian liturgy

by KOHAR ensemble under the direction

of Maestro Sebouh Apkarian.

Today, the Antoura Monument is a pilgrimage site visited

by thousands who travel from around the world

to come and honor the memory

of the orphaned Armenian children of Antoura.

They come to touch their epitaph and to feel their sorrow,

giving voice to the silenced crime committed

nearly 100 years ago and still left unrecognized.

The next day, April 24, 2011,

marked the 96th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide,

the 20th century's most documented,

least recognized ethnic cleansing campaign.

Descendants of hundreds of thousands

of Armenian Genocide orphans from around the world arrive

at Dzidzernagapert, at Armenia's capital city

of Yerevan to commemorate the darkest day

of the Armenian reality and world history.

Nearly 100 years later, with 21 world governments

and 43 U.S. states having recognized the Armenian Genocide,

the memory of the 1 1/2 million victims

is simultaneously commemorated

around the globe on April 24th.

The largest Armenian Genocide monument built

on the 50th anniversary of the genocide, in 1965,

with 12 massive pylons rising as reminders

of the 12 Armenian provinces obliterated

overshadows the eternal flame at its core.

The Citadel of Swallows named for the bird

that always returns to its nest even if it is destroyed,

keeps alive the memory of 1.5 million

as massive crowds gather for a collective prayer

around the eternal flame,

representing perhaps countless candles lit worldwide.

As mourners climb into the monument,

steep stairs force them to bow their heads.

And as they depart, a second monument,

a shaft rising high into the sky,

symbolizes the rebirth of a nation

from the ashes of annihilation.

This program was made possible

by generous contributions from the Bezikian Family.

Additional support was provided by Dr. Noubar Ouzounian,

the Chitjian Foundation and viewers like you.