Anyone reading this material will immediately realize its immense value. Oral history in general, and of the genocide specifically is a very critical matter for Armenians as they try to piece together their family and national puzzles. Unfortunately, the book as published could not reach enough people, with the market for Armenian language books being what it is today. The printing was generously sponsored by His Holiness Aram I, Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia, and was done primarily in Eastern Armenian, although some of the regional accents are preserved throughout the book. This web publication will help it reach a great deal more people, all over the world, but until its translation into English it will not reach its full audience. Anyone able to help in such an endeavor should contact the author.

The book itself consists of 240 survivors stories, and then you are presented with songs sung during and about the genocide, and more about the survivors themselves. The author, Verjine Svazlian, collected most of these testimonies herself through many years, across Armenia as well as some interviews abroad. She has published other works from these interviews and this presentation of the raw interviews themselves will allow scholars to utilize them, as well as Armenians interested in the events and way of life in the villages of their ancestors. This may even bring some families to find one another again. Too many of the survivor interviews done by scholars have been hidden completely from the public, and from other scholars. I hope these transcripts will be the first in a series of such publications which bring to light the events of the Armenian genocide, on an individual level.

I have encountered some difficulty in transferring the text to web format as some non-standardized Armenian fonts were used. These alternate encoding systems can leave out certain information (characters) when transferred, and these problems will be corrected in time. The testimonies themselves are not affected, but many of the songs, especially in the orignal dialects are. To help solve this you can install the fonts Nork and its umlaut version which was created specifically for the publication of this book, and view the text in those fonts in your word processor. Some musical notes and pictures of some of the survivors will be added in the future, and hopefully the English translations as they become available.

The number of eye-witness survivors alive today is very small. If you know anyone who has not been interviewed, please print out the Survivor Interview Guide TODAY! and record this irreplacable bit of the puzzle. Even children of survivors who are no longer with us should record all that they have been told for posterity as well.

In one week we will commemorate the 86th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian Genocide. Despite the well funded efforts of the Turkish government to silence the Armenians, these stories can never be forgotten.