Khatchig Mouradian (*)
They arrived [in Meskeneh] by the thousands, but the majority left their bones there.
—Auguste Bernau, German employee
of the American Vacuum Oil Company[1]
My first copy of Andonian’s Ayn Sev Orerun was a reprint issued in Beirut in 1985, on the 70th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. It had a black cover with a drawing of a woman, in tears, next to a lyre.
I remember reading it as a teenager cover to cover, several times.
The short stories were particularly jarring not only because of the
horrid accounts and graphic details, but because page after page, the
perpetrators were not named: The word “Turks” did not come up at all in
the book.[2]
Andonian did not name the victims either. The book had such a profound
impact on me that to this day, every time I see that cover, sadness
resurfaces.
