Archives for April 2001

Ivy and Gregory Ivazian

‘To spite them, I decided I gotta stay alive’

By J.D. Lasica

Aghasi “Ivy” Ivazian invites a visitor into his North Sacramento home with a sweep of his hand. In a back room, amid scrapbooks and photo albums, he tells his story animatedly.

He is 78 years old, perhaps — there is no way to be sure. He was born in the city of Van, the historic center of Armenian civilization. It was in Van that the first fighting between Turks and Armenians broke out in early April 1915, an episode that historians say led to the government’s decision to deport the Armenians into the desert.

The Ottoman authorities, according to historical accounts, demanded 4,000 Armenians for the war against Russia, but the Armenians held back. Says Ivazian: “We knew what they had done in other places. They barely put these people in the army, made them dig ditches. They shot them and buried them in the very ditches they dug.”

Turkish troops and irregular soldiers from Kurdish villages in the area, under the command of their German allies, launched a five-week assault on the outnumbered Armenians of Van. [Read more…] about The Ivazians

‘We were so happy we were going to live, we showered the officer with kisses. We showered his horse with kisses.’

By J.D. Lasica

‘Emmy” has never before told her story to an odar, the Armenian word for foreigner. There is a reason for this: She does not speak English.

Emmy — an English transliteration of the Arabic word for “mother” — is what everyone calls Haygouhi Shahinian.

At an even 5 feet tall, she is a slight, wiry woman of 86, with white hair and a high-pitched voice. Her son, George, translates, but she forges ahead with her story before he can get the words out.

“I remember when the troubles started,” she begins. “I was in the first grade, in Tarsus. One day my grandmother came and pulled me out of school. She was crying. We rushed home, and my father and uncle were standing with a gun at the window, looking at all the commotion in the streets. [Read more…] about Emmy Shahinian

As the 20th century’s first mass slaughter of civilians slips from the memory of a world grown accustomed to atrocity, the Armenians’ resolve to remember grows stronger.

This article originally appeared in The Sacramento Bee’s Forum section on April 24, 1988.

By J.D. Lasica

It was a remarkable gathering. Salpi Ghazarian, a 32-year-old Armenian activist, studied the strong, lined faces of the men and women who sat before her in the slat-wood chairs of Sacramento’s St. James Church on a recent Sunday afternoon.

Yervant Ohanesian, 92, and his wife, Vart, 83, were here. Many years ago they had separately survived the forced march across the barren Syrian sands that Armenians came to know as the Desert of Death.

Aghasi Ivazian, 77, sat close by. As a boy of 4, during his family’s flight from the massacres in Armenia, he escaped an ambush by Ottoman Turk soldiers when a Russian Cossack on horseback spirited him from the battle site.

And Blanche Kasparian, 81, had come, too. She tearfully recalls the day during the government-ordered evacuation of her home town that her mother took her aside, made the sign of the cross and said, “Honey, remember, whatever they do to us, don’t ever forget who we are.” The 9-year-old girl and her mother survived the deportation, but their Armenian village was reduced to nothing. [Read more…] about Martyrs Day: Witnesses to genocide