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Armenian,
Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News
Family, torn apart by genocide, to reunite
WORCESTER — It's a heartbreaking scene echoing forward in time from the Armenian Genocide of nearly 86 years ago.
A mother was on a forced march with her children in the Turkish desert when an officer passed by, grabbed the mother's 11-year-old daughter, and threw her on his horse. The mother, Isgoohi Gadarian, tried to pull her daughter, Heranoush, away from the officer, but he kept hitting Isgoohi with his whip. Her 5-year-old son, Herair, cried out for his mother to stop pulling because he was afraid the officer was going to kill her. The officer rode away with Heranoush.
So a family was separated forever. Heranoush and Isgoohi never saw each other again. Heranoush was forced to convert to Islam and marry a Turkish man. Isgoohi was finally able to meet up in New York City with her husband, who had come to the United States before the genocide with the idea of making some money here and then returning home.
Tears echoed in Turkey and America. Heranoush died in Turkey in January 2000. Isgoohi died in New York 20 years ago.
But, as the poet Tennyson once put it, `Our echoes roll from soul to soul.' And somehow, after forced abduction, false hopes and death, the family remains connected. On Sunday, as Easter services were being conducted upstairs in the Armenian Church of Our Saviour, 87 Salisbury St., Isgoohi's daughter, Margaret E. Bedrosian, of Worcester, was reading a letter from Fatima, Heranoush's granddaughter. Mrs. Bedrosian's children, Richard C. Bedrosian and Nancy S. Bedrosian, all dressed for Easter, looked on.
`I propose the following,' Fatima wrote a few weeks ago. `Margaret meets her niece, Richard meets his cousins; we all meet at the tomb of grandma Heranoush.' Will they? `Oh yes,' said Nancy Bedrosian. `Definitely.'
At the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide to be held at 12:30 p.m. in the Armenian Church of Our Saviour this coming Sunday, Margaret Bedrosian will remember both Heranoush, the sister she never saw, and Herair, the little brother she never met who perished in the forced march in the desert. He is one of 1.5 million Armenians who died in the Armenian Genocide, which began on the night of April 24, 1915.
Mrs. Bedrosian said her mother would seldom talk about what happened during the genocide.
Armenians had lived under Turkish rule for centuries, but a Turkish ultranationalist movement began depicting Armenians as traitors and untrustworthy. Paranoia reached a crescendo with the onset of World War I, when Turkey sided with the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Armenian men were rounded up and shot. Women and children were sent on long marches in the desert. Another son, Khoren, would also be kidnapped, but this would have a happier ending.
`She talked about it at times, but some of the things that were hateful to her she left out,' said Mrs. Bedrosian, who was born in the United States in 1924. `It would bring tears to her eyes and I didn't really want to hear that.'
Although her mother was silent, she was able to learn more about her family's fate from other relatives, including Isgoohi's sister, Dirouhi, who had also been on the forced march.
`My aunt Dirouhi never forgot that scene as long as she lived -- her beautiful sister being whipped by the gendarme as he carried the girl away.'
But after some Armenians had returned to their homes in the late 1920s, Mrs. Bedrosian's parents were able to learn of the general whereabouts of both Khoren and Heranoush. So her father, John Gadarian, went there in 1928 with the intent of bringing his son and daughter back. After paying an intermediary, he was reunited with Khoren. But the intermediary said it was too dangerous to see Heranoush. She was already married.
After coming to the United States, Khoren would correspond with Heranoush.
`My mother and father knew very little Turkish,' Mrs. Bedrosian recalled. `And then, I don't know why, the correspondence stopped.'
However, hopes soared in 1950 when a sudden flurry of letter writing led to arrangements for Heranoush to come to America for a visit. The family would be together again at last.
`We were so ecstatic, happy,' Mrs. Bedrosian said. `And, lo and behold, her son came instead. To this day we don't know what happened.'
It was later suggested to Mrs. Bedrosian, `How do you know it wasn't her husband who wouldn't allow her to come?'
The son stayed all summer, but Mrs. Bedrosian's family soon lost touch after he returned to Turkey.
Years passed, and that might have been the end of the story. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bedrosian had married and moved to Worcester. In Turkey, family circumstances saw Fatima move in with her grandmother.
Fatima had assumed Heranoush was Turkish, since she had never given any indication that she wasn't except to say cryptically from time to time, `you're one of us.'
Then, in 1992, Heranoush told Fatima about her childhood and 1915, and the aftermath.
`What I have heard shocked me. I have experienced rebellious emotions in unbelievable dimensions. It took me a long time to recover,' Fatima wrote to the Bedrosian family recently.
So outspoken and outraged, in fact, that the Bedrosian family did not want to reveal Fatima's last name.
`I have learned 1915 from her (Heranoush),' Fatima wrote. `Thanks to her I have learned to question the official history.'
The government of Turkey still denies that a genocide took place. `This is still taboo,' Fatima wrote. As are personal histories such as Heranoush's. `Thousands (of Armenian women) were forced to convert,' Fatima said.
After telling her story, Heranoush had a request for her granddaughter.
`I don't know how to find them,' she had said of her family in the U.S. `Only you can find them. Please find then for me.'
Fatima tried, and Richard C. Bedrosian had also made attempts at his end to locate his aunt. Things came close to success, but it ultimately was to no avail. However, in death, Heranoush would bring about what she had not been able to realize in life.
After Heranoush died, Fatima placed an obituary in a newspaper in Istanbul that audaciously gave details of her grandmother's whole abduction experience. `I decided to give an account in order to explain the realities,' Fatima wrote. The obituary also listed the names of all the relatives she had heard about. An Armenian newspaper in Paris picked up the obituary and ran it in its editions. Armenian Archbishop Mesrob Ashjian saw the Paris version of the obituary, and recognized some of the names. It turned out he was distantly related to the Bedrosians.
So Archbishop Ashjian made some phone calls. He called Richard Bedrosian in April 2000. Mr. Bedrosian, in turn, contacted the newspaper in Istanbul that had run the obituary. The next day, he was talking on the phone to Fatima. There have since been lots of letters back and forth. `It sounds that she (Heranoush) was just like my mother. She was a very wise woman. She was a pillar of the family. Throughout her life she was always on the side of justice and the oppressed,' Mrs. Bedrosian said. `It's sad. When we first got those letters we were just devastated by it. We never met her, and this poor woman never had a say in her own life. All she wanted was to see her family again.'
But as soon as Mrs. Bedrosian recovers from some recent eye surgery, something that Heranoush would have liked will occur:
Margaret will meet her niece, Richard will meet his cousins; and they
will all meet at the tomb of grandma Heranoush.
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Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News Archives