The inheritor of parents having survived the Armenian Genocide, famous opera singer Arax Mansourian shared the following with Yerakouyn:

Anna Pamboukian and Yeghia Mansourian had four children, including me, my brothers Tigran and Mher and my sister Sona. My parents were orphans having experienced the horrors of 1915…

My mother would often tell my children, Shushan and Mariam about her years spent at the orphanage. She remembered how she migrated with her mother Sima, her sister Margarit and her brother Hovsep and how her mother had shown her a metal gate and told her that the Turks had burned their father and many other Armenians behind that door.

She would also tell them how her mother Sima and sister Margarit were killed on the road and how only her brother managed to save himself and reached Brazil…

My mother never saw her brother again…

As far as I can remember, my mother was three years old at that time. She grew up at the orphanage in the Syrian city of Hama.

I can’t say anything about my father because I was only 12 years old when he died…

Every year on April 24^th my mother would place the hands of my little Shushan and Mariam in her palms and walk with them to the Armenian Genocide memorial in Armenia…We, the four children, knew that my mother’s date of birth was unknown. That’s why she would say she was born on April 24^th…”