Extinguished During the 1915 Armenian Genocide
by Robert Aram Kaloosdian
Published by Peter E. Randall Publisher
Distributed by University Press of New England
100 years after the Armenian Genocide, new eyewitness accounts share the truth of what happened
The 20th century might well be described as the century of genocide—a century of recurring, state-sponsored efforts to extinguish entire peoples. Among the first of these crimes was the organized action of the Young Turk government to eradicate the Armenian people from the lands they had lived on for thousands of years. Begun in 1915 and continuing on through 1923, this state-sponsored act of mass murder and “ethnic cleansing” ended with the deaths of the majority of the Armenian people at the hands of government forces, paramilitaries, and even their non-Armenian neighbors, who were encouraged by the government to take part in the killing and the spoils. This brutality represented something new in the “modern” world, something for which there was no word until one was coined to describe what had happened there: genocide.
Through meticulous research and never before published interviews with eyewitnesses, Genocide survivor’s son Robert Aram Kaloosdian captures the story of the tragedy that befell the individuals living in a single Armenian village, a village that stands as a representation of the events repeated throughout Anatolia between 1915 and 1923 designed to exterminate the Armenian people and wipe them from the face of the earth.