-Speculate as to what the person might be feeling based on their picture and their story.
-Finally, imagine and write about what you think may have happened to this person after the story he/she tells, what questions does he/she leave unanswered?
Arpiar Missakian is a gray haired, wrinkled man who was just a little boy when he first encountered genocide. Twenty-thousand turkish soldiers with Mausers and other artillery had attacked Kessab. The men of Armenia tried to fight back with ancient* artillery and during the struggle they had lost fifty to sixty men be for they fled.
He returned to the city only to find out that all of the houses had been burnt down to the ground and the city needed months of repair. He and his family--father, mother, four brothers, two sisters, Arpiar was 20 or 21 at the time--were then forced to move with everything they had under armed guard control to Meskeneh on the Euphrates river, which was a huge outdoor camp made for Armenians. People in the camp were moved bit by bit to Der-Zor at which they died. Sixty-thousand Armenians had died there and were buried under the sand.
I am almost positive that by the way this memoir/biography was written that Arpiar felt full contempt for the Turks because of the sandy bread that they had to eat that they had bought from the soldiers.
After the story, I think that Arpiar would have gotten close to death but managed to escape somehow.
Did his family members survive with him?
Did he have any friends that were Armenian that were there too?
Where there guards watching from every corner ready to kill whoever tried to escape?
*out of date, not used anymore, obsolete
No comments:
Post a Comment