Though Koko Mazloumian was an Armenian in the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian Genocide, he and his family escaped persecution due to their close ties with some of the Ottoman leadership.

Mazloumian’s family ran the storied Baron Hotel in Aleppo, Syria. Despite the fact that most other places they were massacring Armenians, the Turkish army adopted the hotel — which also had a mostly Armenian staff — as a sort of informal headquarters.

The hotel was a unique intersection of adversaries in more ways than one. The Mazloumians also sheltered Aram Andonian, an Armenian journalist and writer who had been deported along with a large number of other Armenian notables.

In 1915, the year Andonian arrived at the hotel, the Armenian Genocide had begun and Cemal Pasa had also take up residence at the Baron. Pasa was one of the Three Pashas who ruled the Ottoman Empire during the First World War and were the main perpetrators of the genocide.

Other notable guests at the time included Kemal Ataturk, who would later become the first President of Turkey, and two Turkish Parliament members who were brutally murdered after leaving the hotel and refusing Mazloumian’s father’s offer to hide them.

Mazloumian himself was a young boy at the time, running around as an Armenian in the frequent presence of governors, police, deportations directors, and other important officials.

The family didn’t completely avoid persecution, however. When some other Ottoman officials came to Aleppo and saw what was happening, they deported the Mazloumian family. Though originally the Mazloumians were sent to Mosul, which had garnered a bad reputation among Armenians, Pasa instead ordered them to go to Jerusalem. Unlike other genocide victims who were packed into carts full of animal feces to be sent somewhere, Mazloumian and his family went in what he called “luxury,” with four goods carts among them and mattresses spread on the floor to sleep and provisions provided by the Turkish army.

The Mazloumians didn’t even end up making it to Jerusalem, instead requesting Pasa let them remain in Zahle, Lebanon. They returned to Aleppo at the end of 1917.

Though the Armenian Genocide altered and destroyed the lives of thousands of Armenians, Mazloumian’s and his family’s lives remained mainly unchanged. After the genocide they continued to live in Aleppo and run the Baron Hotel which gained a storied history as the host to prominent historical figures such as Agatha Christie, T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), Charles de Gaulle and Theodore Roosevelt. The hotel is still standing, the oldest in Syria, but was forced to close its doors in 2014 due to the Syrian civil war.