Our Grandmother’s Will to Survive
Our grandmother did not want to talk about the Genocide. Frances (Iskouhi was her Armenian name), came from a family with seven children. Only she and her brother Hamazasb made it to America.
In an era when Armenians lived in fear, they wanted at least one family member to be outside of Armenia. Hamazasb had been sent overseas as a precaution.
Frances was not so lucky. After her father, other brothers and one sister were killed or taken as slave labor, she, her mother and remaining sister were marched off.
“I haven’t any place to go,” she recalled. “I stay in the street. Nights I sleep in the corners, I sleep with the dogs. I go to the door … a small piece of bread, begging to eat. They took everything we had … not only me of course, all the people. Lots of people. And we travel, we haven’t anything: no shoes, everything torn, dresses torn. Finally we arrive at some place that is desert. And they say to us, ‘Take off your clothes.’
“They take our clothes, our jewelry, our money. Then they say, ‘If we find anything on you, we are going to kill you.’ So we give it to them, they are powerful. They got the guns, we haven’t anything. Just— all women—and we were all bare, very bare. My mother and sister went off to find water and something to eat. And they died on the way.”
Because Frances spoke English, a Turkish woman took her in to teach her daughter the language. The daughter, who had little interest in learning, put out her cigarettes on the back of our grandmother’s hand, scarring it forever.
Near the end of her life, out of concern that the story was being buried, grandmother Frances was persuaded to speak of her experiences. Her daughter Alice documented the story in her book, Silences: My Mother’s Will to Survive.
The two of us pictured here are Alice’s sons. Christopher is holding the book, and Joseph has a letter that Frances wrote to her brother Hamazasb in 1914, describing the worsening conditions in Armenia.