One fateful day in Marash in 1915, Marta Chinchinian Bilezikjian, Marash Girl's great grandmother, left her home carrying a loaf of bread dough to be baked in the commercial ovens of the marketplace. Marta never returned home. No one knew what had happened to her until the day that Marash Girl's Grandma Yepros Kurtgusian-Bilezikian, while working in the hospital in Marash, happened upon a patient, a Turkish man, who was wearing Great Grandma Marta's coat. What a beautiful coat, Yepros commented (speaking perfect Turkish and fearing the worst). Yes, the Turkish man answered proudly; I took the coat off of an old Giavour [Christian] woman before I threw her into the ovens.
Marash Girl's great grandmother Marta perished in the first days of the Armenian Genocide. Almost 100 years later, yesterday evening, Marash Girl's friend Bianca, talking about her new film project -- a film effort to comprehend the incomprehensible -- an effort at understanding the Armenian Genocide of 1915 through the lens of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 -- talked about the horrors that took place in Rwanda; one such detail haunted me: during the 100 days of killing in Rwanda, the wives of the Hutu murderers were proudly wearing the coats of the Tutsis, the coats of the very people that their husbands had murdered.
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