GENOCIDE SURVIVOR
Alan Hustak, The Gazette, ahustak@thegazette.canwest.com

Montreal Gazette, Canada
Friday, September 14, 2007

A funeral will be held this morning for Arousiag Aghazarian, thought to
be Montreal’s oldest living survivor of the Armenian genocide. Although
official birth records were destroyed during the First World War,
she was officially said to be 104 when she died on Tuesday.

"Nene" Aghazarian lived through a massacre committed by members
of the Young Turks political party against Armenians in 1915, was
married when she was about 13, and gave birth to the first of her
six children when she was about 15 years old.

"Some people escape tragic circumstances but allow their pain to
consume them," said a granddaughter, Annette Aghazarian. "But she
wasn’t like that. She lived her life with a quiet dignity.

She lost her siblings and her father in the genocide and was haunted
by horrific scenes she witnessed when she was still a child.

"One in particular was seeing the decapitated head of a little girl
with ribbons in her pony tail in a pile of body parts.

"Nene often wondered why her life was spared when so many others
were destroyed. She lost her sight about 15 years ago, but she never
questioned God’s will. But she couldn’t help but ask why she survived
while so many others didn’t."

Arousiag Yovanessian was born in Dortyol, Hatay, a seaport on the
Mediterranean in what was then the Ottoman Empire. It would seem she
was born in 1906, but an arbitrary birthdate of July 1, 1903, was
stamped on her passport later when she left the short-lived Republic
of Armenia.

Her father was a farmer and her mother was a midwife who had a
reputation as being a healer. She lost her father and most members of
her family when Ottoman Turks embarked on a program of ethnic cleansing
to rid the country of its Armenian minority. It has been estimated
that one-and-a-half-million Armenians died as a result. Before the
First World War began, an estimated 2 million Armenians lived in the
Ottoman Empire. By 1923, only 500,000 remained.

In 1919, Arousiag Yovanessian married restaurateur Giragos
Aghazarian. The couple fled Turkey in 1921 when Turkish Muslims refused
to recognize the newly created, primarily Christian, Armenian Republic,
and renewed atrocities against Armenians.

They moved first to Syria, then to Lebanon, then to Palestine. There
her husband opened The Picadilly, a popular restaurant in Jerusalem’s
Armenian quarter.

After Israel was created in 1947, they moved to the port city of
Jaffa with their five sons and a daughter.

Her husband died in 1960.

In 1968, Aghazarian came to Canada to live with her only daughter,
Takouhi. One of her sons, Hovaness, died in Brazil in 1973.

She is survived by five children – Levon, Kevork, Noubar, Hampar and
Takouhi – 13 grandchildren, 22-great-grandchildren, and one great,
great grandchild.

Her funeral is at 11 a.m. today at the church of St.

Gregory the Illuminator, 615 Stuart St. in Outremont.
From: Baghdasarian