Excerpted from an account by Dirouhi Highgas in an interview conducted by William S. Parsons and Intersection Associates for a videotape production, "Everyone's Not Here: Families of the Armenian Genocide". Cambridge: Intersection Associates, 1989.

eople in the villages watched us go by . . . they were watching us. I'll never forget how they were watching us. I felt so ashamed that one day I cried and I told my mother, "Everybody's watching us and we're just poor refugee people. We're not like we were when we lived in Konia. We're different now, aren't we?" She [mother] said, "No we're not different. You know what a diamond is, Dirouhi? Sometimes you put the diamond in the mud. But when you take it out, it's a diamond. Nothing will happen to it. So that's what it's going to be like for you and all the rest of the Armenians. They think we're just mud, but we're not!"

It was wonderful [having my mother say this]. She wasjust trying to make me feel better because I was so full of shame. We looked shabby, you know; I was beginning to look terrible. . . . We weren't sleeping; we weren't eating anything! So we travelled for another two days this way.

Then one day when we started early in the morning, there was no water in sight - and everyone was just dying for water . . . Then we heard someone hollering in the front of the caravan, "Water! Water!" And I remember [I looked up] and I could see a lake. The gendarmes told us to stop the caravan so we could all go ahead to the water. But oxen have a very bad habit. When they see water you can't stop them and when the oxen saw the water they just ran straight into it taking the cart and all of us with them. And then they jusi layed down and drank. The oxen destroyed a lot of the wagons.

We stayed there that night on the outskirts of a town, but in the morning it was just terrible. Everybody was sick. Nobody could stand up. It was the water we drank. I remember my mother was so sick, my grandmother, my grandfather. . . , Everyone had pains and dysentery. . . . I remember thinking about all the shame and how everything was erased from our world. . . . What happened . . .

I'll never forget that day. There were so many sick people and my grandfather thought we should get a few people and talk the gendarmes into letting us stay here a few days, at leastjust to see who's going to die and who's going to live. There was no way anyone could get up on their wagons. Everybody was very sick. The gendarmes said, "We'll stay tonight, but we're going to leave very early in the morning."

The next thing we saw the gendarmes taking my uncle to throw him in where all the dead people were. There were hundreds of people who died that day from dysentery. So my mother said, "Oh they're taking Stepan! There taking Stepan! They think he's dead; he's very sick!" My mother begged the gendarmes to please leave him here. "Just give him two hours" [she said] "and then you can take him any place you want." So we sat there and he got better little by little. . . . Everybody was getting a little better from the sicknesss. We [began to realize] that we're not going to die-whatever left of us there was. . . . There was no medicine. The gendarmes didn't care whether you lived or died. They didn't care.
 

Published in "Teaching About Genocide",
Volume 55, Num.2, Feb. 1991