SURVIVOR: BIOGRAPHY OF ARAM ANDONIAN

By Rita Soulahian Kuyumjian Survivor of the Armenian Genocide, 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 butchered near Ankara. By the time the war was over, he had been arrested and had escaped more than 20 times and spent time in a concentration camp in the Syrian- desert. After the Armistice in 1918, he dedicated himself to transcribing the stories of the survivors. In 1919, he published the first literary work on the Armenian Genocide. In Those Dark Days; was acclaimed by literary critic Hagop Oshagan as the most perceptive account of the life in Ottoman Turkish concentration camps, its filth, cruelty of the gendarmes, hunger and death of women and children. In 1919, Andonian also published The Great Crime, the first systematic portrayal of the events of 1915-1918 as a great crime against humanity. The