Garabedian Family

Jennie's mother, Dirouhi, with Jennie's brother and sister.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jennie Garabedian’s mother and father, Toros Garabedian and Dirouhi Der Torossian, grew up as children of tenant farmers in the village of Garmery, within the Armenian province of Harpoot. Their happy memories of this life were frequently recounted to Jennie when she was a child: in the middle of the summer, when they have the blessing of the grapes in Armenia, [my mother] said all the villages would gather at this lake, and it would just be a joyous, happy time. They actually were living a very happy time and getting along with their Turkish neighbors for the most part at that time.” her father left for America in 1909, with the intention that his wife would follow him some time later, and Dirouhi was chagrined to have to live with her husband’s family while he was away: “evidently she didn’t get along with her sister-in-law…she was in the field all day long and her sister-in-law had to take care of the children. She said she’d come home at night and the children would have flies on them and be all dirty. She said, finally, I’m leaving here. I’m going back to my father’s house and i’m going to stay with him.” 

Dirouhi was still in Armenia when the genocide began. During this time, Armenians relied closely on each other to stay alive; Jennie describes a story she was told wherein her mother, one day, went outside and found a half-naked woman who had escaped from the Turks, begging for her help. Dirouhi took her in, and the woman then married Dirouhi’s  recently-widowed brother. Another time, Dirouhi encountered a group of Armenian women in need of clothes; she gave them some, and several years later encountered one of the women at a refugee camp in Aleppo. she was on the street and this woman came up to her and hugged her and kissed her and said, "you saved my life that night."

“People were helping each other as they could, hiding them when they could. It’s through the grace of God and the help of people that my mother survived, I think."

--Jennie Garabedian, 2022.