Nora Hovsepian, the granddaughter of Vergine Djihanian, Genocide survivor, expressed a story on her grandmother's behalf:
“Vergine Djihanian was an Armenian girl who lived with her parents and eight brothers and sisters in the city of Erzinga, Turkey.
In the summer of 1915, Vergine witnessed her father and uncle being beaten and axed to death in front of her eyes by Turkish gendarmes. Her mother and aunt frantically gathered up all of their children, took them to the nearby banks of the Euphrates River, said their prayers, and holding hands together at the river’s edge, threw themselves into the raging waters, choosing to die by their own hands rather than falling victim to the barbarity of the Turkish soldiers surrounding them.
All of them drowned, except 9-year-old Vergine, who clung to the branch of a weeping willow tree overhanging the river, instinctively wanting to survive. Vergine was too young to understand why her family was dying around her. She was too young to understand the fear of being raped or enslaved by Turkish soldiers, but she was old enough to know that is she could just hold on a little longer to the hanging branch, then maybe she could be saved. She hung on for what seemed an eternity. However, she felt hopeful again when a compassionate Kurdish family came to the river’s edge, saw her desperation, and rescued her. She was the only one who survived the ordeal, saving her from an agonizing death.
She worked as a maid in the house of her rescuers for a few years. Then American missionaries had come to the region trying to find lost souls. Vergine was taken to an American orphanage, and at the age of 14, she was reunited with her two older brothers who had been in America for several years and who were frantically trying to find any surviving members of their large family.
Vergine came to New York on a ship through Ellis Island in 1921 and built her life there. She met and married Missak Kalebdjian, another survivor of the Armenian massacres, in Adana in 1909, and she never told her only son or anyone else about the unspeakable horrors she had witnessed.
Vergine Djihanian Kalebdjian was my grandmother. She told me her story when I was 10 years old, sitting me down with a serious and sad look, preparing me for what I was about to hear. As I listened, I could not even fathom what she had gone through at the same age, and until now, and for the rest of my life, I will never forget her story.
Nearly 60 years after her nightmare, the memory remained fresh within my grandmother's mind. She wept uncontrollably as she told me the story of her family’s fate. I tried to comfort her, telling her I did not want her to cry, but she wanted to get it out, as it had been festering inside her for all those years. She could not bring herself to tell my father, her only son, about her childhood as he was growing up, because she wanted to spare him the pain she had endured. She wanted to give him a better life and happy memories.
My grandmother said that she had to pass down the legacy of what happened to her and her family to my generation, so that we could tell the world and seek justice for the unspeakable crime against our people.
I will forever cherish her words and her memory."
