| esquire within | - Remember Azneve.

93 years ago, half a world away. A young girl of nine, perhaps ten years helps her family bury their belongings just outside the Village of Moush. She wiped at soil-stained hands, her nails caked with dirt. Her hair, so long she often stepped on those dark tresses, was wound behind her head in a white ribbon. Hidden among their possessions was precious account of their family line, recorded in a Bible now committed to the ground.

Whispering a prayer, she looked to her father. This was the last time she would see him.

The Turks were coming.

“Tdatdo,” my mother would say, herself a young girl sitting on her heels as her grandmother’s voice caught on the memory of blood and burning sand, “tell us more.”

Azneve swallowed against an ancient, haunting thirst. Far removed from her evening tales of Persian princes and happy endings, she immersed herself once again in remembrance. She would tell this story, because that is what history asked of her. What the dead asked of her.

It was too late. They had been found. She and hundreds of families were compelled to march, the steel of Turkish gendarmes driving them to the east. Above, the crescent moon, crest of murderous sovereign, set poised like a scythe to sweep them all into the sand, voiceless and forgotten.

As they were led away in forced procession, the village behind them succumbed to the secret, vengeful fire of the long sand, its homes and churches reduced to smoldering ruin on a dwindling horizon.

It was a relocation, the Turk had told them. “For your own protection,” he said as he oiled the edge of his bayonet.

Later she would watch as her cousins threw themselves to a river choked with bodies of the fallen, foul waters pooling behind a dam of bent and broken forms barely recognizable as human. She envied them that final, cold embrace. But still she prayed.

Deeper into the desert they walked. Others joined them on the march with tales from other provinces; of teachers, poets, and priests hung from bridges and trees; of children stripped from their families, young girls carried off by laughing soldiers; of women burning alive in the streets of Diarbekir.

They killed the men, first. One by one, husbands, fathers, and brothers all were given in crimson shadow to the desert. A knife to the throat saved the price of a bullet, pennies not to be wasted on Armenian dogs.

A group of boys, bound together by rope, were led across a distant dune. They were not seen again.

Others, the sick, the wretched, and the hungry, fell into the waste, their feet bound in bloody tatters, their faces burned by sun and scathing sand. Thirst stalked them like a beast, picking off what prey the gendarmes left it, wearing on the weary and the weak as the Turks drove them onward. There were the Kurds, too, who swept upon them, raping and murdering the women, and leaving with the children.

But not the girl with long hair and dirty hands. One night she slipped away from the doomed procession, her ribbon wrapped around her feet, her infant brother on her back.

She did not know how long she wandered before darkness finally took her.

Azneve_2 She touched her shoulder with a translucent, knotted hand; she could still feel her brother’s terrified grip. It was 45 years later that she discovered he had lived, taken to an orphanage after Russian soldiers had found them unconscious in the sand. Of the thousands of kith and kin driven from Moush in late April, only these two unlikely survivors remained. The others took their place in the first genocide of the Twentieth Century, along with 1.5 million men, women and children sent to die in the desert of Der-el-Zor.

Today marks the 93rd anniversary of a brutal, systematic eradication by Turkey of its Armenian population, historical fact which Turkey contends is mere fiction. Their denial keeps open a wound to a cultural consciousness that pleads for acknowledgment –- for healing. To deny the Armenian Genocide is to dishonor hundreds of thousands murdered by a government resolved to answer once and for all the “Armenian Question.” To deny the Armenian Genocide is to trample the unmarked graves of the slaughtered.

To deny is to forget. To let it happen again, and again, and again.

Azneve Ohanian survived the Genocide of 1915.

Honor her strength.

Tell her story.

Remember.