Armenpress
ARMENIAN GENOCIDE COMMEORATED IN SWEDEN’S UPSALA
UPSALA, APRIL 13, ARMENPRESS: Armenian cultural center Raffi in Sweden’s
Upsala held an event dedicated to the 90-th anniversary of the Armenian
genocide on April 9, attended by local students and representatives of the
city, who heard a report on Armenians’ past and present.
The library hosted also an exhibition of photos about the genocide and a
documentary shot by Pea Holmquist, an independent Sweden filmmaker and
Suzanne Khardalin, a Lebanon-born Armenian journalists, called I Hate Dogs.
It is about the 1915 Armenian Genocide, planned and carried out
mercilessly by the government of the Ottoman Turkey. The main character is a
98 year-old Armenian, Garbis, a survivor of the genocide. Garbis tells his
devastating story-about how he survived the genocide. He lost his entire
family when he was only 9.
One morning the Turks seized his village; the men were separated from the
women.
Garbis did not realize the gravity of the situation and took leave of his
mother- a last hug and a last kiss, as it was to be, from his weeping
mother.
Together with his father and several thousand other Armenians, Garbis was
forced to go on a death march, all the way to the Syrian desert. He was in
the company of his elder brother and a cousin but en route both of them died
of hunger and exhaustion and several days after died his father.
He was only nine years old and some people helped him carry the body away
and bury it.
Later in the evening Garbis wanted to see his father’s grave. “Then I saw
several stray dogs feeding on my father’s flesh. They were tearing his
thighs apart. I grabbed some stones and threw them at the dogs to frighten
them off, but the dogs had become wild-they started growling and ran towards
me. I was terrified, so I ran away. That picture has haunted me all my life.
I see the dogs, right in front of me, just ten meters away.”
Garbis started his first business at the age of 15 in Mosul, Iraq, then
he moved to France where he settled down. His son Serge, has taken up his
business of a textile factory. “It took my dad 40 years before he felt able
to tell me the story. He just could not tell it to me,” Serge, a very
distinguished gentlemen, living in a fashionable apartment in Paris, says.
Turkey has not recognized the genocide so far, but is eager to join the
EU. “I am planning to live at least 100 years. There are so few of us left
and for God’s sake, I am not ready to take my story with me to the grave,”
Garbis says.
Holmquist, a film school professor in documentaries and Suzanne
Khardalian, have shot other films about the Armenian genocide and
Armenians-Back to Ararat and Her Armenian Prince.