The Georgetown Boys

- Ed Papazian

From a humble orphan’s beginnings to an outspoken public figure, my father, Albert Papazian, served his country well. Born in Aintab, Turkey, in 1911, Dad would have been around five during the Armenian genocide that occurred from 1915 to 1917. Along with his mother, brother and sister, he escaped to Aleppo, Syria, after his father died during the First World War—presumably as a result of the genocide, although Dad never confirmed that. Fatherless, the family roamed the Middle East for about three years. My dad said, “As a boy, I remember being hungry and cold a lot of the time, wandering from one place to another, scrounging crumbs here and there, and sleeping wherever we could find shelter.”

In 1921, his mother, who died a year later, surrendered her children to an orphanage in Lebanon. Dad was ten at the time.