Exhibit D / Survivor Testimonials
A name.
A voice.
A life remembered.
Encounter survivor testimony through memoirs, recorded interviews and the archives preserving them.
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A survivor’s testimony begins with a person: a name, a home, a family and a life before the Armenian Genocide. Listening means allowing that life to remain larger than the violence inflicted upon it.
The Armenian Genocide left 1.5 million Armenians murdered. Those who survived preserved accounts of deportation, captivity, loss, escape and the years of rebuilding that followed. Their records take different forms: memoirs, interviews, family recollections and statements gathered by institutions assisting refugees.
This exhibit is a guide to identified survivor voices and the collections preserving them. External recordings remain with the institutions named below. Links provide routes to their own access information; they do not imply that AGMC owns those collections or has reproduced the interviews here.
Aurora Mardiganian: from memoir to oral history
Aurora Mardiganian, born Arshaluys Martikian, carried her testimony into a 1918 book, Ravished Armenia. The Library of Congress records the New York edition and its contributors, Mardiganian and H. L. Gates. The catalogue provides an entry point to the published source rather than an anonymous retelling.
The Zoryan Institute later recorded her audiovisual testimony in 1984. Its account of Aurora’s Sunrise explains how that interview informed the animated documentary directed by Inna Sahakyan. A memoir, a recorded interview and a later adaptation offer different encounters with her life; each needs its own identification.
Mardiganian also appeared as herself in the 1919 film Auction of Souls. That production dramatizes her experiences. Surviving scenes must not be described as camera footage of the Armenian Genocide unfolding.
Begin with the Library of Congress edition and the Zoryan Institute’s account of her interview. Our longer feature, Aurora Mardiganian: The Survivor Who Made the World Listen, connects these sources.
Karnig Panian: a child’s experience remembered
USC Shoah Foundation’s Armenian Genocide resources include Goodbye, Antoura: An Armenian Survivor’s Journey, a virtual educational activity about Karnig Panian. The Foundation identifies Panian as an Armenian boy from Gürün who was forced from his home in 1915.
His story offers a route into the experiences of children whose survival was bound up with displacement and institutional life. The educational resource should be approached through its own context and guidance, rather than reduced to an isolated dramatic extract.
Find the Panian activity and Armenian Genocide collections at USC Shoah Foundation. The same page explains its Armenian Film Foundation and Richard G. Hovannisian collections. Collection access and reproduction conditions are set by the holding institution.
The Aleppo Rescue Home records
Not every survivor account was recorded in a studio or written for publication. Administrative records can also preserve a person’s account of what happened and how they reached a place of refuge.
Edita Gzoyan’s The Aleppo Rescue Home: 1464 Accounts of Armenian Genocide Survivors brings together accounts preserved in League of Nations archives. The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute describes the publication’s original English records, Armenian translations, photographs and research annotations.
These documents are particularly important to the history of abducted Armenian women and children and their escape or rescue from captivity. Read the Museum-Institute’s description of the publication. Their institutional setting differs from a later full-life interview, and that difference should remain visible when the records are used.
Collections preserving survivor voices
The Zoryan Institute’s Armenian Genocide Oral History Collection provides a route to its collection information, catalogue and access policy. Its program has preserved audiovisual survivor interviews, making the speaker’s voice and presence part of the historical record.
The USC Shoah Foundation’s Armenian Genocide collection guide describes interviews gathered through distinct projects, including work associated with filmmaker J. Michael Hagopian and historian Richard G. Hovannisian. Readers should consult the description attached to the particular testimony, rather than assuming all recordings were made by the same interviewer or at the same time.
These institutions’ resources are linked for research and education. An archive may provide public selections while setting additional requirements for full recordings or reuse. A publicly viewable interview is not automatically permission to download, edit or republish it.
How to listen without losing the person
Record the survivor’s name, the date of the interview or publication, the language and any translator or editor identified by the source. Preserve the archive’s reference when one is available. Those details keep a quotation connected to its speaker and allow other readers to follow it back.
Listen for the life surrounding the violence: family relationships, work, language, faith, everyday surroundings and the years after survival. An account of a childhood home or a remembered relative is part of the historical record, not a digression from it.
A descendant’s account can preserve something a parent or grandparent shared. It should be identified as inherited family testimony rather than presented as the descendant’s own eyewitness experience. A memoir, an interview and an institutional file can illuminate one another while remaining distinct sources.
Continue exploring
Visit Women Writers and Eyewitnesses for related written records, explore Maps of the Armenian Genocide to connect places with narratives, or read Documenting the Crime on survivors as record keepers.
For historical context, return to Inside the Armenian Genocide. For teaching, begin with Teacher Resources and the guidance supplied by each archive.