From reader D.

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Please don't use my name or email in the thread.

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https://www.wnd.com/2023/04/armenian-genocide-grandmothers-secret/

April 24 is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, marked annually to commemorate the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians a century ago, a mega-crime the nation of Turkey has never acknowledged.

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." – Ephesians 6:12

Decades ago when I was very young, my grandmother, Mary Kupelian, told me a haunting story I've wondered about ever since.

As I sat in the kitchen of her cozy little home in Bethesda, Maryland, eating her delicious homemade bread and talking about a frequent topic – the Armenian Genocide, which she and my dad (as a little boy) had barely survived – she shared with me the following enigma.

"The Turkish people are very hospitable people," she said with surprising warmth, seeing as they had murdered her husband and dozens of other members of her extended family, just a few of the 1.5 million Christian Armenians killed by the Turks during the first genocide of the 20th century. Grandmom knew the Turkish people well, not just from having grown up in southern Turkey, but from having returned several times to the "old country" later in life, during more quiescent times.

However, continuing her story, she intimated to me that the Muslim Turks lived under the spell of strange forces.

"They were very hospitable and would invite you in," she said. "But, if a distant signal was given – it sounded something like a trumpet – then they would instantly change, and would attempt to harm you. Yet if the signal sounded again, they would immediately switch back to normal."

"Even," she added by way of illustration, "if they had injured you after the first signal, as soon as the second signal sounded, they would bind up the very wounds they had inflicted on you."

As I said – a very, very strange tale, with overtones of "The Manchurian Candidate" and its post-hypnotic suggestions (remember the Queen of Diamonds?) triggering murderous, pre-programmed behavior.

First, it's necessary that I briefly summarize my family's personal experience during this terrible period.
'If you embrace the Islamic religion, you will be saved'

It was 100 years ago, and my dad, just a toddler then, along with his mother and baby sister were among thousands of Armenian Christians being herded into the Syrian Der Zor desert east of Aleppo to die. That's right, to die. Forced into such a miserable and dangerous trek, the plan was that exposure, hunger, thirst, bandits or marauding soldiers would get the job done, one way or the other. As for my father’s father, a physician, he had already been forced into the Turkish army against his will to head a medical regiment to tend to the Turkish soldiers' injuries.

"One of my earliest recollections, I was not quite three years old at the time," my dad told me shortly before he died in 1988, was that "the wagon we were in had tipped over, my hand was broken and bloody, and mother was looking for my infant sister who had rolled away. The next thing I remember after that, mother was on a horse, holding my baby sister, and had me sitting behind her, saying, ‘Hold on tight, or the Turks will get you!’"

The three of them rode off on horseback, ending up in Aleppo, one of the gateways to the desert deportation and certain death. Once there, my always-resourceful grandmother Mary bluffed her way into getting an audience with Aleppo’s governor-general. Seeing as her Armenian doctor husband was in the service of the Turkish army – albeit by force – she played her one and only card, brazenly telling the governor general, "I demand my rights as the wife of a Turkish army officer!"

"What are those rights?"

"I want commissary privileges and two orderlies," she answered.

"Granted."

By thus boldly deceiving the not-too-bright Turkish politician, Mary avoided the unthinkable, saving not only her own life and those of her son and daughter, but also the lives of her husband’s two brothers, whom she immediately deputized as orderlies. The group then succeeded in sneaking several other family members out of harm’s way, and my grandmother kept them all from starving by obtaining food from the commissary. Thus was my family spared, although my father’s infant sister was unable to survive the harshness of those times and died shortly thereafter. And my grandfather, Simeon Kupelian, was executed along with other Armenian doctors by a squadron of Turkish gunmen.

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