FRESNO — Tadem Press, a new imprint dedicated to publishing primary sources on the Armenian Genocide, has published its second volume: Guleeg Haroian, At Four O’clock in the Afternoon, and Eva Hightaian (née Haroian), Bones and Bodies, We Had To Walk Over Them
At Four O’Clock in the Afternoon is the only first-hand account in existence of an adult female who survived both the 1895 Massacres of Armenians by Sultan Abdul Hamid and the 1915 Armenian Genocide. Guleeg Haroian survived the 1915 Genocide through forced marriage to a Muslim. Bones and Bodies, We Had To Walk Over Them is the first-hand account of her daughter, Eva, who was deported in 1915 and survived the Death March through forced transfer as an orphan into a Muslim home.
After WWI ended, mother and daughter were reunited, and Guleeg Haroian began the hard work of reclaiming orphans and young brides who had undergone forced transfer into Muslim homes.
At Four O’clock in the Afternoon is the oral history of Haroian, a woman who went on to work for the vorperhavak (“collection of orphans”). This is the only oral history available in the English language of a woman who went through both the 1895 Great Massacres and the 1915 Genocide.
Bones and Bodies, We Had To Walk Over Them is the oral history of Hightaian (née Haroian), the nine-year-old daughter of Haroian who was separated from her mother and deported in 1915 along with two sisters and an aunt. She survived through forced transfer into a Muslim household.
Afterword: Rebecca Jinks, Comparative Genocide Scholar, Holocaust Research Institute and Department of History: Conflict, Violence, and Terrorism Research Center, Royal Holloway – University of London. Jinks compares the experiences of captured and reclaimed Armenian women and children to that of three others: indigenous children in Australia and North America who were removed from their families and placed in boarding schools to teach them the “white man’s ways”; women from Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities who were abducted, and raped, and forcibly married into different religious communities during the Partition in India in 1947; and to Yezidi women and children were kidnapped by Islamic State (IS) forces, distributed or sold to IS fighters and supporters, and kept as slaves in 2014.
