Khosrova was about two hours away on foot, but the children and wounded among us slowed the column, and darkness fell before we arrived. We were shut for the night in a walled garden packed beyond capacity. Hungry, thirsty, and bitterly cold, we slept pressed against one another for warmth.
In the middle of the night we woke to sounds around us. Several Armenians had set ladders against the far side of the walls and were climbing into the courtyard. Afraid of the Jilu men who held us, they did not fire their rifles. Instead they threw woollen rugs over the men, so that the blood would not stain them, and stabbed them with knives. They left after killing eleven people.1
The next morning we were divided into two groups. Ours was taken to the Muslim village of Sabra and confined in a coffee house that the villagers had emptied. At noon each person received a round piece of bread, roughly forty centimetres across and as thin as paper. Even four such loaves would not satisfy a hungry person. It was the intermediate period of Passover; my parents would not eat the bread and gave us their portions.
After dark several Armenians entered the coffee house. They took whatever remained in our pockets and any good clothing we still wore. They also tried to take women from among us.
Those two days were almost unbearable. At night cries rose from every direction — “Father! Father!” and, elsewhere, “I am freezing!” Looking around, I suddenly saw my brother Shimon outside among those calling out. I ran to tell my parents that he was alive and had returned to us.
Shimon later told us what had happened since we were separated in Kuhna Shahr.2 Among the Assyrians he met two villagers, Yohanna and Shimon, who knew him and our father. They told David Khan that our father had helped them after Ottoman troops had looted their homes, and asked that Shimon be placed in their charge.
They took him home, stripped off his clothes, and dressed him as one of their own. Then they gave him a horse and rifle. “You know the houses of the rich,” they said. “Show them to us. We will put something aside for our future and give you a share. Afterwards we will search for your family among the captives.”3
Shimon went with them to Kuhna Shahr. The town was deserted, and bodies lay in the houses — many of them familiar, including relatives, though none from our immediate family. The grain store in our own home was empty. While his companions searched prosperous houses for gold, money, and carpets, he searched for food.
After the goods were carried by cart to Golozan, the two men helped him search among the prisoners. We were not there. Some said we might have been taken to Khosrova; others said that, if we were still alive, we would be in Sabra. That was how he found us.
My parents’ joy at seeing Shimon was immense. Relatives and acquaintances among the captives crowded around him, begging to be saved from starvation. His escorts said they could take no one else without horses and carts, but promised to return the next day. I burst into tears and insisted on going with my brother. Shimon seated me behind him on the horse and promised our parents that he would come back for them.
- According to later accounts by women in the family, women in the refugee concentrations blackened their faces and bodies with ashes from the fires in the hope of avoiding assault.
- The change to Shimon‘s voice is marked explicitly following Dr Mordechai (Moti) Zaken’s editorial observation that Sinyor Demirel’s eyewitness testimony must be distinguished from an account related to him by someone else. Correspondence, 16–17 May 2020.
- The original phrase reads literally, “we shall take for our world”; it is interpreted here as setting property aside for the future.