fall 2013
It began with a knock on the door.
clark alumni magazine
22
ugrditch Nazarian, a merchant in the city of Mezre, was roused in the middle of the night by Turkish gendarmes who said they wanted to make some immediate purchases at his store. Things quickly turned ugly, and Mugrditch was dragged from his house in his pajamas. It was the last time his family would see him. No one ever learned Mugrditch’s fate. Some said he was taken a few miles out of town and shot; others believed he was among those who were imprisoned in Mezre and exposed to inhuman tortures so unbearable that he and the other prisoners poured the kerosene from the jail lamps onto themselves and ended their lives as human pyres. The year was 1915, and the Ottoman Empire had commenced with the systematic annihilation of Armenians and other Christians who were deemed enemies of the Muslim state. The men were the first victims, beginning with 250 unsuspecting Armenian intellectuals and leaders in Constantinople who were rounded up on April 24, imprisoned, tortured and killed. From there, males over the age of 15 were routinely herded into the streets, marched outside the city limits, and shot to death on lonely roads. Women, children and the infirm were deported — hundreds of thousands of refugees driven over the mountains and into the desert under the whips of Turkish soldiers. Among the deportees were Mugrditch Nazarian’s pregnant wife, Varter, and their six young children. The family fled Mezre with the hope of reaching safety in Aleppo, Syria. Only Varter would survive. Her six children died on the journey, some brutally murdered. She gave birth along the trail and the infant perished as well.
Years later Varter found her way out of the storm and to America. Whether she found peace is another story.
Dr. H. Martin Deranian ’47 sits in his living room in Shrewsbury, Mass., thumbing through a black binder at least six inches thick that chronicles Varter’s life. In faded photographs, some a century old, she looks into the camera lens with a curious half-smile — in one she is clearly pregnant, clasping the hand of the dashing Mugrditch. Carefully placed in the binder’s plastic sleeves are her 1920 passport from Aleppo to the United States, still in one piece but as fragile as late-autumn leaves, and heartfelt letters, meticulously penned in Armenian handwriting, to the Worcester man she would eventually marry. Varter is Martin’s mother. She died when he was nearly seven years old, never having spoken to him of her past sorrows. Such a thing was unthinkable. In 1966, Deranian contacted a minister who had served at one of the way-stops in the Turkish city of Urfa during the Armenian deportation, and he convinced the man to interview an elderly woman in Fresno, Calif. She had been good friends with Varter in Turkey and had experienced her share of hardships during the deportation. Through this first-hand account, the minister compiled an intimate history of Varter’s life. The details of her ordeal were punishing to learn, but necessary. “I had to know the truth,” says her son. Corroborating the friend’s recollections with published accounts of the events in Turkey and the road to Aleppo, Deranian produced an unvarnished biography of his mother titled “The Wailing Well.”