The Yeterian Family
I’m Chacké Yeterian Scallen. My father, Sahag Yeterian, was born in Adana and escaped to Aleppo, where he served as a tailor to the Turkish military governor. Warned by a friendly officer that his name was on a list of Armenians to be arrested, Sahag escaped that night with a caravan bound for Mosul, present-day Iraq, which was then under Turkish control.
Shoushanig, my mother, came from a mill-owning family in Erzurum, near the Russian border. Wealthy families like hers were the first to be sent away. The government said they were being relocated away from the war zone, so they piled their belongings onto ox-carts and were sent off in caravans. In fact, the killing began in Erzurum even before they left. Shoushanig’s father, an unusually tall man, was found naked in a ditch with his throat cut.
After a journey of more than a hundred miles, Shoushanig’s caravan reached the city of Erzinjan, and then everything was taken away. The people had to walk from then on.
In Mosul, an Arab Christian family hid my family in their home for about six months. After that it became too risky to shelter Armenians. The local churches warned that the Turkish authorities might search people’s houses, so my grandmother, my parents, and their infant daughter had to leave.
They joined a caravan of refugees walking to Baghdad, 250 miles south, along the Tigris River. It was a terrible journey. People were starving. My mother’s milk had dried up, so the baby was crying all the time. Finally some men in the group came up to her. “We have to choke the baby to death,” they said. “She’s giving away our position and putting us all in danger.”
My mother and grandmother got on their knees and prayed that God would take her. And the next morning, the child was dead. They buried her in a hole in the desert. Until the day my mother died, she always talked about the child in the desert. Was she still there? Did wolves or dogs dig her up and eat her?
In all, my mother lost about fifty members of her family. My father lost only a younger brother. His other two brothers were out of the country when the massacres started. But my mother’s side was completely exterminated. Nobody came out except my grandmother and my mother.