Armenia and Her People; or, The Story of Armenia by an ArmenianFilian, George H.
History
Armenia and Her People; or, The Story of Armenia by an Armenian
Filian, George H.
Armenia; Armenian question
Then they
poured kerosene on the buildings and burned them.
They went to one village and killed every man; the women of course,
knowing their fate was soon to be worse than their husbands'. One of
the leading women, named Shaheg, perceiving that the Turks and Kurds
were getting ready to seize and ravish them, called the other women
and said, "Sisters, our husbands are killed, and you know what is in
store for us and our children. Don't let us fall into the hands of
these savage beasts; we have to die anyway, and can die easier, and
without being defiled first, and perhaps tortured. Let us go to the
precipice and jump off." So saying, she took her baby on her arm, ran
to the rock, and threw herself over; the others followed her, and thus
all were killed. The Turks captured many boys and girls, six, or eight,
or ten years of age, held them by an arm or foot, and hacked them to
pieces with their swords. Sometimes they stood the boys in a row and
shot them, to see how many could be killed by a single bullet. They
wrenched babies from their mothers' arms, cut their throats while the
mothers shrieked and pleaded, and boiling them in kettles, forced the
mothers to eat the flesh. They cut open women about to become mothers,
tore out the unborn babes, and marched triumphantly with the ghastly
trophies on their spears--something almost surpassing the savagery of
the Apache Indian. Even their worst horrors they made worse yet by
the way they did them; they took a gloating delight in doubling the
cruelty or the shame by making it torture others too. The husband
was forced to look on while his wife was violated, and she in turn
while he was mutilated, tortured, and murdered; the father while his
daughters, even little girls of ten or twelve, were deflowered and
their throats cut, the son while his parents had every form of shame
and torture inflicted on them, and were killed before him, or saw him
killed first. They tortured their victims like Indians or Inquisitors,
in every fashion of lingering death and torment that makes the heart
sicken and the blood run cold to read of. Crucifying head downward,
and pouring boiling water or ice-cold water on them, leaving them so
till death came; flaying alive; cutting off arms, feet, nose, ears,
and other members, and leaving them to die; thrusting red-hot wires
into and through their bodies. They pulled out the eyes of several
Christian pastors, said, "Now dance for us," poured kerosene on them
and burned them to death. They put a Bible and a cross before others,
and ordered them to first spit and then trample on both, and deny
Christ; on their refusal they were butchered. The handsomest girls
and young matrons were not murdered, but worse; each one was kept as
a spoil of some Turk or Kurd, who carried her to his house, and made
a slave and concubine of her. Many hundreds of them are there to this
day, enduring the awful fate of having been dragged from happy and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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