Knar Yamenidjian, back row middle, is seen with her family in Egypt in 1931. Her father is situated on the bottom row, far right. (Courtesy of the Yemenidjian family)
Armenian Genocide survivor Knar Yemenidjian was remembered in Canada, the reports.
She was one of Canada’s last living links to an atrocity that occurred more than 100 years ago. Although Knar Yemenidjian, who died on Jan. 19, reached the age of 107, her childhood was marred by unfathomable violence that nearly ended her life.
“We’re all grieving with the family,” Armen Yeganian, Armenia’s ambassador to Canada, commented after Ms. Yemenidjian’s death. “But she was also a bigger symbol, I would imagine, for the Canadian Armenian community and for Armenian people in general.”
She was born Knar Bohjelian on Feb. 14, 1909, in Caesarea, a city in central Turkey now known as Kayseri. Less than a year earlier, a group of Turkish reformers known as the Young Turks overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid and established a constitutional government. Although the Armenian population of Turkey was initially optimistic about the new regime, they were caught off guard by the xenophobia of the Young Turks and their targeted hatred aimed at Christians and non-Turks who they believed were a threat to the Islamic, “pure Turkish” state they envisioned.
When the Young Turks began their campaign of mass murder on April 24, 1915, the first order of action was arresting and executing several hundred Armenian intellectuals. After that, other Armenians were either systematically slaughtered by marauding killing squads or forced on death marches across the Mesopotamian desert without food or water.
Six-year-old Knar and her family survived the first wave of violence by seeking sanctuary in a barn. Ms. Yeminidjian’s niece Nazar Artinian told CTV News that the family survived only because Knar’s father had been warned by a Turkish friend that “all the Armenians were going to be killed.”
According to Ms. Artinian, the family friend insisted, “if you want to live, leave your house, take your family and go to this farm and hide yourselves there.” So the family hid among the livestock. They were besieged by typhoid and had barely enough food to sustain themselves, but they survived.
When the violence subsided, Knar and her family returned to find many of their neighbours murdered, and all the Armenian homes – including theirs – burned to the ground.
Ms. Yemenidjian’s son said that his mother had a wonderful, self-effacing sense of humour. He noted that, although she spoke very little English or French, the other residents surprised him one day, when they remarked to him how funny his mother was. “We can’t understand her and she can’t understand us, they told him, but does she ever make us laugh!”
In 2004, Canada was among the first countries to officially recognize the genocide.
At the age of 106, Ms. Yemenidjian was among a handful of Armenian-Canadians who attended a special ceremony on Parliament Hill in 2015 to mark the centennial of the start of the genocide.
To this day, despite widespread agreement among historians, the Turkish government denies that an Armenian genocide occurred. Since 2003, Turkish teachers have been forbidden to use the term “genocide” in the classroom.
Last year, the country recalled its ambassador from Germany after the German parliament voted to recognize the genocide.
Historians conclude that approximately 1.5 million Armenians were killed during the genocide, but Turkey says the death toll has been exaggerated and considers those who were killed as casualties of a civil war.
Knar Yemenidjian leaves her two sons, Joseph and Noubar, three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.