EUGENIE YERGANIAN
When she opened her eyes as an infant, there was a black hole where her family had been. Now, at 100 years of age, Eugenie Yerganian (born Papazian) has lived a century of enforced amnesia.
She never knew her father, or how he met his death. What she knows — from memories of a long-lost uncle — is that her mother fought for her at birth, during the death-dealing horror of the deportations. Over the protest of other captives, who saw a baby as an encumbrance, she refused to abandon her.
Death of children was common in those desperate times. Al Ghussein, in his memoir, tells of seeing servants of a local khan toss away the body of an infant, “as one might throw out a mouse,” saying that it was the child of an Armenian woman who had “lagged behind” because of illness and was too sick to nourish the child.
In the final stage of pregnancy, Yerganian’s mother survived the terrible trek from her family’s home in the Black Sea port town of Samson, where some of the men had tried to defend the town against the Turkish troops, but fell to the onslaught. Women and children were rounded up and deported. After Eugenie’s birth, her mother’s strength was exhausted and she died in a location her daughter would never know.
Eugenie’s first years are an enigma to her. For three years, her maternal grandmother struggled to look after her, then gave her up to an orphanage when she was no longer able to feed her.
So began a traumatic odyssey through three chil- dren’s homes in Greece, where an American relief organization had arranged the placement of Armenians in 13 orphanages. Conditions were bleak and she tries not to remember what happened there.
An Armenian couple took her to Egypt as a foster child, and she spent her early teens in Cairo, where she met her future husband, Garabed Kokorian, at a community centre dance. He was a shoemaker in his 20s, and had escaped the genocide.
Eugenie was15, an age now considered too young for marriage. But at a time of massive trauma and insecurity, many young girls looked to it as a refuge. The main objection was from the community of orphans to which she belonged: they had picked out one of their own for the pretty, dark-haired teen, and Kokorian was an “outsider.”
Still the couple overcame resistance and married. They lived in Alexandria and Cairo, bringing up five children. But it was not until the1980s, when Eugenie met her mother’s surviving brother, then living in France, that she learned the sketchy details of her early life.
Widowed in her early 40s, she remarried, and was widowed a second time in1997. Now, living in Toronto near her children, nine grandchildren and 11 greatgrandchildren, she is the matriarch of a thriving clan. But what remains of the past is a great void that will never be filled.
“I never saw my mother or father,” she says. “I was cut off from my roots.”