Books

The Survivor: Biography of Aram Andonian

The Survivor: Biography of Aram Andonian

Rita Soulahian Kuyumjian

London: Gomidas Institute, 2010,
x + 86 pp., photos
ISBN 978-1-903656-94-5, paperback
UK£10.00 / US$14.00

To order please contact books@gomidas.org




Aram Andonian (1875-1951) was among the 200 Armenian intellectuals who were arrested in Constantinople on April 24, 1915.
On the way to the killing fields, he broke his hip and was sent to a hospital, while his friends were moved on and killed near Ankara. By the time WWI was over, he had escaped and been arrested more than 20 times. He even survived the Syrian death camps.

After 1918, he dedicated himself to transcribing stories of the survivors of the Genocide. In 1919 he published the first ever literary work on the Armenian genocide. In Those Dark Days was acclaimed by literray critic Hagop Oshagan as the most perceptive account of life in Ottoman concentration camps, with its filth, cruelty, hunger and death. In 1919 Andonian published The Great Crime, the first systematic portrayal of the events of 1915-1918 as a great crime against humanity.

In 1919 Andonian was the secretary of the Armenian National Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. Andonian also became the first curator of the AGBU Nubarian library in Paris.

This work is part of "Trilogy - April 24, 1915", Aram Andonian (Rita Soulahian Kuyumjian comp and ed), Exile, Trauma and Death: On the Road to Chankiri with Komitas Vartabed (vol. 1), Rita Soulahian Kuyumjian, Teotig - Biography  (vol 2) and Rita Soulahian Kuyumjian, The Survivor: Biography of Aram Andonian (vol. 3). Also by the same author: Archeology of Madness: Komitas, Portrait of an Armenian Icon
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