By Stephania Domingo Rajme with Ryan Pigot

“I am Armenian, I live free, I die free, I am Armenian,” my great grandmother would say to us. We learned to say this in Armenian before I knew almost any other words. April 24 marks the centenary of the Armenian genocide, when 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives. Members of the Armenian communities all around the world will gather on this day to pay their respect for loved ones lost during the genocide.

Tension between the Ottoman government and the Armenians began in the late 19th century with their request for equal rights. During World War I, Ottoman officials were concerned about the Armenians potentially siding with Russia and began to strategically target the Armenian communities. They first arrested Armenian intellectuals and community leaders, then carried on to evict families from their ancestral lands and send them on deportation marches. The men were separated from their families and shot elsewhere, while the women and children were told they would be relocated. Garabed Hekimian, my great-grandfather, embarked on this journey as a child from what is now Gürün, Turkey, towards Aleppo, Syria. On this death march, three of his four siblings were lost to starvation, leaving him, his mother, and youngest sister alone in the desert—a story similar to many of the families caught in the genocide.

The Armenian diaspora is scattered worldwide, and France has a large and vibrant Armenian community that has played a key role pressuring the European Union for recognition of the genocide. For my great-grandfather, the French played a decisive role in his escape from the conflict. A group of French soldiers saved him and a group of others and took them to Aleppo. From here he was able to make passage to Marseille and carried onto Argentina, where he worked and saved until he could afford for his mother and sister to meet him in Mexico. My great-grandfather, like many others, took refuge on the American continent.

Grace Aznaburian, my great-grandmother, lived in Harput with her family and was five years old when the genocide began. Her father was killed when he arrived in Turkey from the U.S., in an attempt to bring them to safety back to the States. Through events that were likely similar to my great-grandfather, Grace and her mother arrived in Marseille, where they too made the leap across the Atlantic to Mexico.

In Mexico, the Armenian community did everything they could to help fellow Armenians rebuild the lives they lost back home. A friend referred Grace to work at a fabric shop that happened to be owned by my great-grandfather. And so through a series of terrible and heartbreaking events, two people were able to overcome great hardship and sadness and managed to find love and happiness in a land they now had to call home.

My great-grandparents’ story was lucky enough to have a happy ending, but many stories of the Armenians caught in the genocide did not. The struggles that they went through and the horrors that they faced have gone unrecognized sadly now for 100 years. This lack of recognition has solidified the tensions between the Turkish and Armenian communities, and so the European Parliament and members of the international community (with the exception of the United States) are urging Turkey to recognize the atrocities committed in 1915 as “genocide”. Hope is that the centenary of these events will begin to break the ice between Armenia and Turkey, and pave the road to improving relations.

In Vancouver, on Friday (April 24), there will be a gathering outside the Vancouver Art Gallery at 5 p.m. There will be speeches from politicians from the different levels of government as well as commemorative readings and music. There will also be a commemorative walk to the Armenian Genocide Monument located at the Mountain View Cemetery on Fraser Street near East 41st Avenue.