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In the summer of 1915 Turkish gendarmes forced all the Armenian residents of Çomakli (now in Turkey) to march 300 miles to Aleppo, Syria, with no food or water. Hagop Asadourian, then 12 years old, was among them. Here he reflects on how surviving in refugee camps and orphanages, and losing 11 family members, shaped his life.
Dr. Richard Hovannisian was one of the world’s foremost scholars of Armenian history and the Armenian Genocide. A child of survivors, he founded the Armenian Genocide Oral History Project at UCLA in 1969, recording interviews with more than 1,000 genocide survivors. He donated the collection to the USC Shoah Foundation in 2018.
Dr. J. Michael Hagopian, who later founded the Armenian Film Foundation, survived the Armenian Genocide after his parents hid him beneath a mulberry bush as Turkish gendarmes approached. In 2010, he partnered with the USC Shoah Foundation to preserve and archive 400 testimonies from the Armenian Film Foundation.
Francoise Muteteli was a young teacher in Nyanza, Rwanda, when a Hutu militia attacked her home and murdered her family in April 1994. Francoise escaped the attack by climbing an avocado tree with a bullet wound in her back. A Hutu neighbor hid her in an earthen oven until she was rescued weeks later.
Alphonse Kabalisa was 23 years old when he survived the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. His father and two siblings, as well as extended family members, were killed in the massacres.
Paul Rukesha, then 16, spent three months eluding Hutu militias who were rampaging across Rwanda in April 1994. His father, his stepmother, his brother, and many other relatives were killed in the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. He remembers being rescued by the Rwandan Patriotic Army on July 4, 1994.
On May 4, 1945, Staff Sergeant Alan Moskin entered the Gunskirchen concentration camp, a subcamp of Mauthausen, with the 66th Infantry, 71st Division. The imperative to document the atrocities, ordered by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, inspired Alan to share his experiences decades later.