Shekhnaz’s mother was right in the middle, so in the twinkle of an eye she herself tore her clothes off and collapsed to the ground, shielding her child with her body. Almost immediately they found themselves covered by a pile of bloody bodies. They were lucky; they remained unnoticed when the Turks were passing by the dead bodies to deal the final blow to the survivors of the massacre. Within a few hours Shekhnaz’s mother heard some people cursing the killers. Those were some beggars that had come in hope of picking up something. That was when she made herself heard and the beggars took her and the child with them. Some months later Shekhnaz’s mother took every precaution to hand her daughter to a Greek monastery under cover of night. From time to time she visited her daughter together with an elderly beggar woman. However, once the beggar woman came alone. Hiding her wet eyes she gave Shekhnaz some coins and told her that her mother had found a job far away, and she would not be able to visit her any more. Shekhnaz never saw her mother again. She was sent away from the monastery to find shelter in an orphanage for Armenian children in Syria. She survived, grew up and got married with Mushegh- an Armenian orphan like her. That was the story her parents used to tell her.
Their family moved from Syria to Armenia in the early 60-s. They settled in the town of Ararat. Besides Anahit, they also had two sons. Her father would repeat over and over again that he had named his daughter after his mother. His survival story could as well make one’s blood curdle; it was a quite typical one.
The column of people, those who were not killed at once, was convoyed from Harput to the south. Three days had barely passed when the Turks began to rape and kill. Almost every day the Kurdish villagers attacked the moving columns and kidnapped girls and women. That was how he and his mother lost his twelve-year-old sister. On the fourteenth day the survivors of the column reached the eastern bank of Euphrates. Here they were doomed to drown. The river was dotted with corpses but nine-year-old Mushegh, who could swim quite well, felt that the only chance to survive was in the water. Kissing his mother good-bye, he sank in the water. A Turkish teenager, who came here with his people to make hold-ups and have some fun, soaked him into the water with excited shouting. But Mushegh’s instinct for self-preservation totally overtook both his vision and consciousness and made him pick up a stone from the bottom and hit the Turk in the groin. He groaned and knelt in the water, setting Mushegh free for a moment. Mushegh immediately threw the same stone in his eye. The Turk fell in the river head downwards and drowned; the rest of the Turks were too busy marauding and noticed this unprecedented incident too late to catch up with Mushegh who had swum a sufficient distance. He lost himself in the waves, swimming backstroke, and once he got tired, he commanded himself to live through it all so as to meet his mother once again. He was saved by an Arab fisher. He was treated quite warmly in the Arab village and was asked to stay there for good. But he had to make for Aleppo. Mushegh’s mother wasn’t among a few dozens of survivors who reached Aleppo.