While this happened the gendarmes who were supposed to defend
the caravans mysteriously disappeared and some times even participated in the
attack.
As the marchers continued on their journey, sometimes for as long as seven
months, the people who had not died of starvation saw rotting carcasses of the
people who had been before them. Survivors sometimes had to eat grass or
picked grains out of animal manure in order to stay alive. During the deportations Armenians were very desperate. Women often had to
leave their small children at the side of the road in order to increase their
own chances of survival. Others with more than one child would leave the
weakest behind. One boy tells of the treacherous gendarmes. When they were on their way in a
caravan the gendarmes told them that that a group of Kurds was advancing
toward them. He told the group to leave behind all their valuables in order
to appease them. So they did. Later they were attacked by a group of Kurds
and the boy later learned that the gendarme actually orchestrated the attack. Their was an estimated 1.5 million Armenians that were killed between 1915
and 1923, half of the Armenian population in Turkey, and a third of the
Armenian population in the world, but perhaps what's scarier than the
statistic itself is the fact that very few people know it happened. If you
type the word genocide into an online search engine you would probably get a
couple of thousand results about the Jewish Holocaust in Germany, and only a
couple about the Armenian genocide. This is way out of proportion to the
actual deaths that each of theses events has accounted for: The proportion is
actually less than 6 to 1. Never have these events been taught in our public
schools, never have politicians addressed this issue in a serious manner,
never has the media done any meaningful coverage of these tragedies, and never
has Hollywood created a movie about the mass murders of these innocent people.
What else could we have forgotten about the past, and what else will we forget
in the future.