Madeleine Prochazka a surviver of the Armenian Genocide

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I am doing this blog on Madeleine Prochazka , a survivors of the Armenian Genocide. She was born in 1940. I was a little girl when my mother--over stacks of beans she collected almost religiously from her garden in France and which she would insist we clean and eat every day--would tell me of her youth and of the ordeal she and my father had to go through during the Turkish massacres. Her mother told her that her parents used to own a textile weaving business, which flourished until one day, when she was 7 years old, the Turks came and took the business away. When her parents were in school she and her to sisters were taken out of school. As her mother was undergoing her fourth pregnancy (by then it must have been 1920), one day the gendarmes came to her father’s house and shot him in the snow, right in front of their house. Right after, her parents were told to abandon their home and were sent out to the desert to join the march of other local Armenians like them.My mother told me that they walked for about 40 days, then they reached a church where they took shelter. By then she was thirsty and hungry, particularly for salt, and afraid the soldiers might do to her what they had done to others, i.e., slice open her belly and cut off her breasts to steal the child from her. She begged a “nice” young soldier for salt and asked for his mercy, and the young man agreed. Shwe was born in the US and met her husband, built her own family and stayed in the US to this day.

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