Author Description

Both Guleeg Haroian and Eva Hightaian (née Haroian) survived the 1915 Genocide through forced transfers into Muslim homes. Guleeg Haroian survived through two marriages to Muslims (her first Muslim husband died) and she survived two gang rapes; and Eva Hightaian (née Haroian) survived through forced adoption in a Muslim home. Guleeg Haroian narrates her experience during both the 1895 Great Massacres and the 1915 Genocide; her oral history will be the only one available in the English language of a woman who went through both the 1895 Great Massacres and the 1915 Genocide. Eva was deported and eventually adopted into an Arabic household. When World War I ended, her mother Guleeg Haroian located and reclaimed Eva from the Arab household in Mardin. While there, Guleeg Haroian worked for the vorpahavak (collecting of Armenian orphans). In the Afterword, Jinks compares the forced transfer of women and children during the Armenian Genocide to the capture of indigenous children in Australia and North America for boarding schools and mission homes, to teach them the "white man's ways"; the "ethnic unmixing" of Partition in India in 1947, where women from Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities were abducted as their families fled for the new borders, and raped, kept behind, and forcibly married into different religious communities; and, finally, in 2014, the kidnapping of Yezidi women and children in northern Iraq by Islamic State (IS) forces, who were then distributed or sold to IS fighters and supporters, and kept as slaves--Publisher.