Shake Bogharian
I was too little to remember anything. I don’t remember anything from those years. My mother was a teacher and my father worked in a rice factory. When the Genocide began, they fled into hills to become fedayeen to fight the Turks. A Turkish Bek, a friend of my father’s, took me and brother for the hands of a Turkish gendarm and kept us, took care of us. We lived with him, in Severeg until 1917-18. The Turkish Beg (I don’t remember his name) was a merchant and one day when he went to Haleb on business and he ran into my cousin (my father’s sister’s son). They recognize each other and my cousins said, “please return them to our family.” The Turkish Beg sent us to Haleb where we were reunited with our family. My mother and father were killed in the Genocide. I got married in 1932 in Haleb and moved to Beirut. In 1976, we came to the US.