In late 1918, on a film set in California, a seventeen-year-old Armenian girl named Aurora Mardiganian was acting out the worst moments of her own life. The film would help raise more than $30 million in humanitarian relief. It would also break her.
Dispatches
Aurora Mardiganian & Ravished Armenia
Newspaper ad for Ravished Armenia, Brooklyn, 1919
A Devastating Journey
Arshaluys (Aurora) Mardiganian was born in 1901 in the town of Çemişgezek, in east-central Anatolia. Her father was a successful financier, and the family led a comfortable life. That changed in 1915, when Aurora was fourteen. Her father and oldest brother were imprisoned, and the rest of the family was deported.
For the next three years, Aurora was sold into slavery more than once. She witnessed the torture and murder of young women, including members of her own family.
Aurora eventually escaped into Russian-held territory, where a missionary doctor took her in. She made her way to Tiflis, the seat of Russian authority in the Caucasus, and there she met representatives of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (ACASR), later renamed Near East Relief. ACASR arranged her passage to the United States.
Cover of Ravished Armenia, 1918
Lithograph film poster for Ravished Armenia, 1919
An International Sensation
In New York, Aurora shared her story with several newspapers, and screenwriter Harvey Gates shaped her account into a book. Ravished Armenia: The Story of Aurora Mardiganian, the Christian Girl Who Survived the Great Massacres was published in 1918. It was one of the first English-language books about the Armenian Genocide. Read the full text on HathiTrust.
Gates set out to turn the book into a full-length silent film, and he and his wife, the novelist Eleanor Brown Gates, became Aurora’s legal guardians. Producer William N. Selig acquired the film rights, hired director Oscar Apfel, and arranged for a share of the profits to benefit ACASR. Aurora soon found herself reliving the worst events of her life on a film set in California. She suffered both physical injury and psychological trauma during filming.
Ravished Armenia (also known as Auction of Souls) premiered at the Plaza Hotel in New York on February 16, 1919. Theatergoers paid an astonishing $10 per ticket. The new medium of film spread Aurora’s story farther than books or newspapers ever could.
Aurora became the face of the Armenian Genocide in America. She was paraded around the country and lauded as “the Armenian Joan of Arc.” Audiences responded to the story of the young Christian heroine, and Ravished Armenia proved instrumental in ACASR’s successful $30 million campaign. Watch the surviving 24-minute fragment on the Internet Archive.
Film still from Ravished Armenia; Aurora second from right, 1919
ACASR fundraising broadside for Ravished Armenia, 1919
The Pain of Survival
Aurora found no relief in her newfound fame. She fell into a deep depression and threatened suicide. When she refused to make further public appearances to promote the film, Gates sent her to a convent school and hired look-alikes for the publicity tour. Today, we would recognize her symptoms as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Aurora withdrew further. She settled in Los Angeles and turned down additional film offers. She sued Gates for the $7,000 he owed her and was awarded a partial judgment of $5,000. She eventually married and had a son, but she lived in fear that Turkish soldiers would find her in America. When she was interviewed decades after the film’s release, she said it had not come close to capturing the true horror of what she had witnessed.
No complete print of the 90-minute film is known to survive. Aurora Mardiganian died alone in Los Angeles in 1994, at age 93.
Learning from Aurora
Aurora Mardiganian’s life reminds us that history happens to real people. When she arrived in the United States in 1918, American international philanthropy was in its infancy. The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder did not exist. The concept of survivor’s guilt was decades away. Aurora survived a genocide. Then she was exploited by the men in America who claimed to be her guardians.
Museums memorialize history. They also examine it. This digital museum looks at Near East Relief’s role in the development of international philanthropy and at the institutional and national histories that shaped it. Honest history requires difficult questions.
Aurora Mardiganian, inscribed portrait, Bronx, May 1929
How should we remember Aurora and Ravished Armenia? Some argue that the film deserves remembrance for its fundraising power: it helped raise more than $30 million for the relief effort. Others argue that Aurora Mardiganian was an unwilling sacrifice to an abstract greater good and that the cost to her well-being was too great. Which argument is right?
Perhaps both. Cultural memory changes with time, and our ideas about ethics and priorities change with it. There may be no single right way to remember Aurora’s story. The questions themselves are a first step toward an honest one.
Watch Aurora’s interview from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive.
In 2015, the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity was established in Mardiganian’s name. The prize awards $1 million annually to a humanitarian working to save lives in crisis. In 2022, Inna Sahakyan’s animated documentary Aurora’s Sunrise drew on a long interview Aurora gave in the 1980s and put her own voice back at the center of her story.