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In December 1921, Siranouch Boyadjian, a 19-year-old Armenian woman, tried for the second time to leave France in order to meet her fiancé in the United States (INS, RG 85, 55175/561). Two months earlier, the Board of Special Inquiry had already refused her entry as “a person unable to read”, and a second attempt did not result in a happier outcome. Her illiteracy was clearly a factor militating against her admission into the United States, as the Board’s inspectors established while interrogating her about her previous education: had she ever attended school? Answering that question led Siranouch to recount memories of her childhood – “prior to my exile”. The Ottoman Empire had not yet been swept away by the upheaval of World War I, but already Armenians from her native region experienced such insecurity that her parents, fearing her abduction by a neighboring Muslim family, resolved to keep their daughter home, to the detriment of Siranouch’s education. Later on, the onset of systematic persecutions against the Armenian community in 1915 deprived Siranouch of her father (“I do not know what has become of him”); together with her mother, she was forcefully marched to Mesopotamia where she arrived an orphan. “We were taken from place to place”, said Siranouch, describing the harrowing experience of the death march. She was finally taken by British troops who sent her to a refugee camp in Port Said, Egypt. The following pages delve into displacement as both an instrument and a consequence of extreme violence committed against Armenian children during World War I. The war had a long-term impact on the lives of innumerable individuals (Audoin-Rouzeau, 2013), but for children the experience was particularly traumatic as they passed through the ordeal during their formative years and had to cope from an early age with loss and death. The fate of Armenian children who survived the 1915–1916 genocide has unique characteristics, as illustrated by Siranouch Boyadjian’s story. Her case demonstrates a two-phase process – initial separation followed by a series of traumatizing incidents. First, the child was torn away from the security and support of a loving family; second, he or she was exposed to multiple hardships, deportation leading to refugee camps or fostering institutions, and subsequently a fate of wandering along the circuitous highways of postwar international migration in search of a stable haven. In this process, Siranouch, like so many others who had experienced war during their childhood, reached adolescence and the legal age for marrying and working. The remarkable diversity of Armenian children’s itineraries, during and after the genocide, defies any attempt to build a straightforward typology. The term “migration” itself does not do justice to the sheer ruthlessness of the series of forced displacements, abductions, escapes and other experiences to which these children were subjected. It only partly covers the movements imposed on children such as Siranouch Boyadjian just

Treading paths of violence: displacements of bereft Armenian children in the aftermath of genocide