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  1. Thank you Dr. Garapedian for carrying on this valuable work.

    I’d like to share a personal tale. I led and organised with committee members the recordings in Sydney and Melbourne conducted by Michael Hagopian in the early 1980s. He was with us for almost three weeks filming about 21 survivors of the Armenian Genocide living in Sydney and Melbourne.

    I will never forget the experience, having to this day kept a little archive of records of the filming trip.

    The recorded testimonies of these Australian-Armenian Genocide survivors is remarkable, insightful and sometimes breathtaking when a survivor took a magnifying glass to his or her lived experience.

    In one filming session I saw photos on a side table behind a Turkish-speaking survivor being filmed at her home. I was acting as an assistant to Mr Hagopian in Sydney. I noticed how beautiful the girls and women were in those about 90 year old photos on the side table. Mr Hagopian turned to me and said “The most beautiful were abducted, taken as wives by Turks.” To this day I haven’t forgotten the chill I felt that moment on hearing of such unnatural selection at work. All this followed on directly as a consequence of the political and military decision to decimate the civilian Armenian population of Western Armenia.

    Another Sydney survivor was from Kharpert, which is also where I recall Mr Hagopian originated.

    We filmed this dignified survivor in a novel location, sitting in a park opposite the Sydney Opera House. His testimony was that: “The Turks took us from place to place, we walked and we walked, we were being forced to become weary and fall, to be left to die in the wilderness.” Here he was now, 10,000 miles plus beyond Kharpert, pleased to be one of the few who survived, kept strong by his family and his humour. I grew up with his grandchildren, they were among my first friends when I too arrived in Australia with my parents.

    What gets to you is that these survivor stories, these testimonies, is that they are so personal. There’s no embellishment. They are not dreamlike, insteady they are raw, gutsy, stories and heart wrenching. Few the survivors were able to tell us their story without some tears. From some that’s all we got, tears and tears and more tears.

    The survivors link us to a past that they and we can’t and won’t forget. We won’t get fooled again.

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