Even Hell Was Full

"All that I have written and spoken are crumbs and fragments rescued from the hell of the past - testimony to my own life and to the life of my people. More than once I was doomed to vanish; my existence was not meant to last. But a miracle happened, and I am able to bear witness in writing to everything that was."

Jivan Aristakesian was born around 1905 in Derjan, in the highlands of Western Armenia, in a village once called Khndzorik - "Little Apple" - for its orchards. His first memory is of a memorial fire for his father, burning beside the wall of the family barn, and of tears in the eyes of his beloved grandfather, the village elder.

In this memoir he brings that vanished world back to life: the fields his family worked for generations, the feasts of pilaf and matsoni at harvest time, the neighbours, the songs, the village school and church. Then he describes how it was all destroyed. As a child he lived through the Armenian Genocide and saw horrors that words can barely hold. It was hell - but even that hell was full.

He survived. He lived a long life, raised five sons, and spent his last years setting down what he had seen, so that it would not be lost. He died in 1996.

Even Hell Was Full is not a history book. It is a first-hand testimony: honest, unpolished, and deeply human. It is a story of loss and endurance, of the dignity of ordinary people, and of a man who believed that remembering was a duty he owed to the dead.

"Jivan Aristakesian lived a long and eventful life. Much could be said about it, but it is better for future readers to learn everything first-hand."
- Aniv magazine, 2007