SIRVARD KURDIAN

Sirvard Kurdian remembers nothing of her birth land, or the terrible events that destroyed her home and her past.

Now 102, born Sirvard Kirishjian, she was the youngest of six children of a middle-class textile merchant and a seamstress in the Ottoman Empire’s western Armenian city of Erzurum. Three of her siblings died in childhood.

Sirvard was only 2 when the men and boys in her town, including her father, were rounded up and slaughtered by Turkish forces during massacres and deportations that began in the spring of 1915.

For the next six months, her mother and other women and children were forced to walk toward Iraq, suffering exhaustion, starvation and dehydration: part of a master plan to cleanse the country of Armenians.

“Corpses were lying in great numbers on both sides of the road,” wrote eyewitness Fayez Al Ghussein, an exiled Arab lawyer who saw the horrors suffered by Armenians near Erzurum.

“We were deluged by the number of corpses, mostly children’s bodies.”

Kurdian’s mother “put the children (in saddle bags) on both sides of an ox,” she later learned. Her brother, about 5 years old, walked, pleading for water. But Kurdian’s mother recounted, “every time we stopped at a spring, the guards would urinate in it.” She was forced to pay for clean water, but nevertheless the little boy died.

When the family reached Mosul, in what is now Iraq, they were taken in by Arab residents dismayed by their pitiful state. Soon the surviving women were sewing dresses for a living, hand delivering their creations for handouts of food. They moved on to Aleppo, Syria, where more than 100,000 Armenian survivors settled, including groups of orphans.

There Sirvard attended school and rose to the top of her class, enthusiastically reading and reciting poetry. But at the age of 15, she met and married a young orphaned Armenian man, Khatchik Kurdian. His dream was to start a new life in briefly independent Armenia, declared in1918 and swallowed by the Soviet Union two years later.

He never fulfilled the dream. But before he died, in 1974, he and his wife went to visit Soviet Armenia. She immigrated to Canada in 1991. Now she looks back on the struggle of her life and recites, in a strong voice, the poem she has always lived by. The mantra that helped her survive. Patience is what helps us Overcome any challenge. He who is patient is wise. His land and home prosper. God Himself guards the home Of him who is patient.