Vartanoush Karagheusian Kanian

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I’m John Desteian. The story of grandmother Vartanoush Karagheusian, “the first slave to arrive in this country since the Turkish deportations of 1915–’16,” appeared in the New-York Tribune in January 1920 and was immediately reprinted by more than 80 newspapers throughout the United States. While wartime reporting had focused on the enormous scale of the massacres and forced marches, Vartanoush showed Americans the shattering impact of genocide on an individual life.

Some twelve years earlier, when Vartanoush was still a young girl, her older brother John Nishan Karagheusian had emigrated from their home city of Sepasdia (Sivas) and made his way to Minneapolis. By 1915 he had taken charge of the new Oriental rug department at Dayton’s department store and was helping other Armenian immigrants gain a foothold in the Twin Cities.

In July 1915, along with the rest of the Armenian community, the Karagheusians were exiled from their home and forced into the death march from Sepasdia to Aleppo. Of the thousands who set off in July, months of starvation, abuse, and massacre left just 100 alive by October. Vartanoush’s mother, aunt, and female cousins did not survive; her uncle was murdered by Turkish gendarmes; and her sister Aghavne disappeared.

With her knowledge of languages, Vartanoush was used as a military interpreter and later found work as a nurse in a Turkish military hospital.

When the British captured Jerusalem, Vartanoush escaped across British lines and was sent to an American humanitarian relief station in Beirut. There she was discovered by an Armenian soldier who had been in America and was now in French uniform. Amazingly, the soldier knew John Karagheusian and wrote to him at once.

With timely assistance from the Near East Relief humanitarian organization, John was able to send funds to his sister and bring her to New York, escorted by an NER worker. Vartanoush, now in her mid-20s, had been tattooed as a mark of slavery and was still unable to eat solid food due to the starvation she had endured on the death march.

By sharing her story with the press, Near East Relief sought to draw attention to the more than 100,000 women and girls still in bondage, as well as more than a million destitute adults and 250,000 war orphans in need of humanitarian aid.

In Minneapolis, Vartanoush was reunited with her surviving siblings and found happiness as the bride of Arman P. Kanian, a fellow Sepasdia Armenian in John Karagheusian’s Oriental rug department. Her sister Aghavne, located in 1920, also settled in Minneapolis.