• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Interview with Jenny Garabedian by Bruce M. Stave and Sondra Astor Stave for Armenians in Connecticut Oral History Project, Farmington, CT, August 12, 2013. BRUCE STAVE: Interview with Jenny Garabedian, by Bruce M. Stave and Sondra Astor Stave, for the Armenians in Connecticut Oral History Project, August the 12th, 2013, at Ms. Garabedian’s home in Farmington, Connecticut. So first, we thank you for participating. JENNY GARABEDIAN: You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to do this. BS: And let’s begin. As I understand it, you were born in the US? JG: Yes. BS: But your family was not, at least your parents, or your mother. Can you talk a little bit about your family first? JG: Surely. My mother was born in 1886, and my father was born in 1884, so my mother was a young woman at the date of the genocide, which was 1915. She had already been married and had two children. My father was in the United States working in one of the industries, one of the factories in New Britain. He worked in the foundry at Landers, Ferry & Clark, which is where a lot of older Armenians worked. When my father left to come to America, my brother was two years old and my sister was six months old, and this was in the year 1909, and my mother was left there with these two children. And in 1915 when the Genocide started, she managed—and I don’t know how she did this. I wish I knew a little bit more about where she went, and how she survived, but she went from village to village, saved her own two children— which is like a miracle, because nobody saved their children, really, at least, all the kids that they had—and also managed to save a couple of nephews. She had stories and stories about what went on in that Genocide. BS: Did she tell you those stories? JG: Many of them, and I learned them much, much later. One of the people she saved was her nephew, who, they got as far as France they were living in Lyon—in Décines, which is a suburb of Lyon, France. And in the year 1962, she and I went to France together. And as she was talking to her nephew— because they hadn’t seen each other for forty years. As she was talking with him, I learned a lot of stories at that time. Prior to that, I think it was so painful for them; they really could not go into detail. I can remember as a child, she’s sitting with her friends and then all of a sudden they would be talking to each other and they would start crying, and then I would cry. And she’d turn to me and say, “Why are you crying?” “Well, I’m crying because you’re crying!” [Laughs] But in any event, she somehow managed to save these people. She lived in Turkey. We come from the province of Harpoot, in a little village called Garmery. Garmery is spelled G-A-R-M-E-R-Y. The Turks have subsequently changed the name of that village to Yedeguz, Y-E-D-E-G-U-Z, which means “seven eyes.” BS: Y-E-D— JG: Y-E-D-E-G-U-Z. It actually means “seven eyes.” All those Armenian villages with Armenian names, most of them have been changed. So if a person who were here, who knew their family’s background, went back and looked for that village, they’d have difficulty finding where it is. But this was in the province of Harpoot and it’s maybe about—how many miles out? Elazig is the city. Armenians used to call that city Mazara. And, oh, maybe it’s about ten miles out of the city—at least ten miles out of the city. And how they got into the city was by foot, mostly, or donkey, or something. I had to laugh. I had friends that recently went to Turkey and they were telling me they built a lot of super highways now in that part of the country, and you take Exit So-and-so to get where you’re going. And I have to laugh because to get to my mother’s village, we left Elazig and we went down the road about the ten miles, and where the cotton fields were, you took a left. It was the road on the way to Diyarbakir, and that’s how we found her village. I mean, you would never find it. It’s not out in the open, or anything like that. I actually have a first cousin who was taken by a Turk in that village at the time of the Genocide. I’m getting ahead of myself now a little bit. But at the time of the Genocide, she was married to an Armenian man who was in America, and had a son with that Armenian man. But as the Turks did in the Genocide, they took Armenian girls and put them in their harems, and she became like the second wife of this Turk. So when I went back there, I visited with my cousin. Thankfully, she was alive at that time. There were seven Armenian women in that village in that same situation, who had been taken by Turkish men in the Genocide, and they had families. I have a theory that a lot of the people from Anatolia are descended from Armenians—people who were left in the Genocide, people who were just taken by force. Women who left their children that they couldn’t take them, death marches, and things like that. But to get to my family, my mother was there hiding from village to village to village with her children, and I can remember her telling me this story one day that she went into Mezzida, the city, and one of the relief trucks was there, and they were handing out bread. And she said people were reaching for it. You know, they were just plain hungry. And she said, “I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to do this. I’m going to go back to my father’s farm, and I’m going to eat the grass from the farm, but I’m not going to live like this.’” So she did. She hid, and I don’t know where she hid. I don’t know where she went. My brother used to tell the story—my brother was considerably older, obviously. They were born across. BS: Right. JG: He used to tell the story: at one point he was in the fields with my sister and my mother came to him and said, “Take care of your sister. I have to go hide because I’m a young woman. They’re going to take me.” So she was gone for a month. Now where she went, I wish I knew. I don’t know. I don’t know how she survived this. 1915 started the Genocide. She was there until 1922, the whole period throughout the whole Genocide, and even afterwards. After the Genocide, the Turkish government came out and said, “Oh, you Armenians, stay here. We’re never going to bother you again. You’re going to be free. You’re going to have whatever you want, have your farms, and so forth.” And my mother at that point said, “I don’t care if you have gold the streets. I’m leaving.” Meanwhile, my father is in America. He knows nothing about what’s going on over there! I mean, he doesn’t know whether his kids are alive, his wife is alive, or anything. I love this story. She went down—they had to have exit visas, and they went down to the Town Hall or the equivalent of it. “Every day,” she’d say, “I’d go down and I’d take my papers and say, ‘Here, stamp these, so I can leave,’ and they’d say, ‘No, come tomorrow. No, come tomorrow.’” She said, “I finally got fed up. I found the man that made the stamp for the Turkish government. I got him to make me a stamp. I stamped my papers and I left.” [Laughter] SONDRA ASTOR STAVE: Wow! JG: She was an incredible woman. I think any of those people that survived were unbelievable people, frankly. How they got to Aleppo, I don’t exactly know. There were several of them in like a caravan type of thing, and they were—they were on donkeys, and walking, and all that kind of thing. But she managed to get to Aleppo. When she got to Aleppo, she was in a refugee camp, and the way that Aleppo was set up in those days, like people from the Harpoot province were in one camp, people from Zatoon were in another camp, people from another area were in another camp, and she was in a camp called Tutun Khan. Tutun means tobacco. So it’s Khan, meaning inn. BS: Do you know the spelling of that? JG: T-U-T-U-N, and Khan is K-H-A-N. Tutun Khan. BS: And she was in that camp? Now, for how long? JG: Two years. BS: Uh-huh. JG: And again, not knowing—my father not knowing what happened to her, and so forth. In my father’s papers, I found a letter from his boss. He had asked for a leave of absence to go back and find his family.

Load more

  40

Copy Link