Story of a Photo: Sister Found Her Brother in Der El-Zor Three Years After the Genocide

The photograph depicts a scene of terrible ordeals that befell the Armenian families during the Armenian Genocide. Orphaned, helpless and defenseless Armenian families were sent to deadly deportations. On the way to the Syrian deserts many people were dying, losing their families and dear ones.

This photograph depicts a brother and a sister, who had lost each other during deportation and only three years later they found each other in the desert of Der el-Zor.

Tens of thousands of Armenian families were destroyed during the Armenian Genocide. The whole families were brutally exterminated. Survivors have lost their wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers. The result of these exterminations, pursued by the Ottoman Empire, was not only massacres, forced displacement and loss of homeland, but also thousands of orphans.

Some of the Armenian women, who were in Turkish harems, refused to leave their new families, as they had small children and were unsure if they could face new ordeals.

Very few of the Armenian children, who have survived by miracle, were “brought back” to the Armenian identity.

“No human language is strong or colorful enough to depict such horrors, or to express the moral and physical sufferings of these innocent martyred Armenians until their release in death. Any survivors, hopeless wrecks from the frightful massacres wherein they have seen all their loved ones perish, sent into concentration camps where torture and degradation worse than death await them”.

Jacques de Morgan
French historian
“Histoire du peuple arménien”, Paris, 1919, p. 276.