From Grief to Hope
“This board of directors, on behalf of all its members and associates, desires to express deep sympathy on the death of your mother. The qualities she possessed, her intense conviction and faith, impel us to offer you with all our heart our feelings of solidarity.”
THESE kind words were part of a letter of condolence I received after my mother died. It was from a group of Catholic gentlemen of the parish of St. John the Evangelist, Casa Verde, São Paulo, Brazil. Yet, Mother was one of Jehovah’s Witnesses right down to her death in May 1966. Even those Catholic gentlemen had to acknowledge the untiring zeal with which Mother served her Creator.
Fleeing for Their Lives
Mother was Armenian. Even though under Turkish domination for many centuries, the Armenians kept themselves separate, for they are professed Christians. But the Turks are Muslim.
In Stanoz, a town near Ankara, Turkey, Mother and her family had lived a peaceful life. But overnight, in 1915, things changed for the Armenian people. A sudden decree of the Turkish government ordered Armenians to turn in all instruments that could be used as weapons, such as knives and planting implements. Next, Turkish soldiers were sent to take all the able-bodied men away from their homes. Many of the menfolk in Mother’s family were taken away, including her father, never to return home again. It was learned later that they were decapitated or bludgeoned to death.
This left my grandmother alone with her elderly mother and her five children, including my mother. Then came the day when all had to flee, for gasoline was poured on their homes and the whole town burned. People ran for their lives, leaving almost everything behind. In the confusion, Mother said they forgot to let their cow loose and could hear her agonized cries for a long time. For several days the sky was overcast with black clouds of fumes.
As refugees, they moved from one country to another, ending up in France. There Mother eventually met my father, and in 1925 they were married. During the years that followed, they had a son and four daughters. Father was also Armenian, from Caesaria (Kayseri), Asia Minor. His family had suffered even more horrible experiences, for they were exiled, compelled to leave their homes, or as they called it, aksor (forced exodus). So people had to leave everything and head for the wilderness, where many of them died of hunger or disease, or were massacred.
Time magazine of August 23, 1982, declared: “The decision to undertake the genocide was communicated to the local leaders by the Interior Minister, Talaat Pasha, in 1915. One of his edicts stated that the government had decided to ‘destroy completely all Armenians living in Turkey. An end must be put to their existence, however criminal the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to age, or sex, or to scruples of conscience.’”
How wonderful it will be when under God’s Kingdom there will be no more hatred or wars, and Paradise will be restored over the whole earth! Then Armenians, Turks, and people of all nations will live together in peace forever.
But let me tell you how my family and I learned about such a wonderful hope.
When a Dear One Dies
In 1938, when I was only eight years old, our family moved to Brazil. Our family chose to live in the city of São Paulo, a big commercial center. Here we began to prosper materially by producing torrão, a candy made of peanuts, which was in great demand.
Our plans were to enlarge the factory. Then suddenly my brother, then 20 years old, got sick with bacterial endocarditis. The doctors told him he had only a few months to live, but they said they could experiment with penicillin, which was new then. However, his fever persisted. Soon streptomycin was developed. We thought this would be the miracle drug. Unfortunately, my brother was apparently allergic to it; his temperature went up to 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40° C.) and his head ached terribly.
We contacted a doctor in the United States, and he told us of a new medicine that could be used in combination with penicillin. It was sent to us by airmail. As we were about to rush off with it to the hospital, a telephone call came through informing us that my brother had died. He was 22 years old. We wept day and night, and there was no one to comfort us.
A Bright Light of Hope
In utter despair Mother started reading the Bible and the Watch Tower publications that Father had obtained over the years. She pleaded with us girls to read them also. Father had done so, and he said there would be a resurrection of the dead. That aroused our interest. My three sisters started to read those publications. As for me, I wanted to read only the Bible, since I didn’t want to be influenced by any religion.
I recalled a conversation I had had with my brother before he died. He said that if there was life after death, he would contact me. Yet, following his death, he had never given any sign of being alive anywhere. So when I read in Ecclesiastes 9:5 that ‘the dead are conscious of nothing at all,’ I knew that my brother was not alive in any place. And how comforting it was to read Jesus’ words: “All those in the memorial tombs will hear his voice and come out.” (John 5:28, 29) But when I got to Revelation 20:5, I wondered about the meaning of it. It says: “The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.”
“It doesn’t mean that the dead will not come out of the tombs before the thousand years have ended,” said my elder sister.
“Where did you learn that?” I asked.
“In those books you didn’t want to read.”
“Which one?”
She could not remember. So I started to read them one by one, and we had more than a dozen! Sometimes I would read all night long in order to find some explanation of Revelation 20:5. How many things I had missed by not wanting to read those Watch Tower books!
We were about to mail a letter to order the second volume of the book Light, on Revelation, and other publications, when a Witness came to our house. He said we could get those books at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses and invited us there. We decided to go. After the meeting the Witnesses lovingly took time to talk to us until midnight and answer our questions on the resurrection.
They explained that the dead mentioned in Revelation 20:5 will come to life during the Thousand Year Reign of Christ, but they will not be granted everlasting life until they have proved faithful in the final test at the end of the thousand years. The resurrection promise was now like a bright light of hope.
“You Are Getting Too Deep”
That very same weekend, still in mourning over the death of our brother, we started preaching from house to house. Grandmother had survived World War II and had come from France to live with us. She was a Protestant. When I showed her how different the Bible was from her religion, she said, “Why don’t you speak to the pastor in my church?” The pastor agreed to speak to us, making an appointment for us to visit him at his house.
“In what sense is Jesus our Savior?” I asked him first.
“He saves us from our sins, and we go to heaven after death,” was his reply.
“And what about those that are not saved?”
“They go to hell.”
“Where did the faithful people go who lived before Jesus came to earth, such as Abraham and David?”
“To heaven.”
“And where did the unfaithful ones go before Jesus’ death?”
“To hell.”
“Then in what sense is Jesus a Savior if before his death good people went to heaven and bad people to hell, and after his sacrificial death it is the same thing? And where did the people that never heard of Jesus go? Can they go to heaven without Christ? If so, then why preach Christ to them? Or did they go to the fiery hell without even having heard Jesus’ name? If so, then Jesus did not come to save them too. Is not Jesus the Savior of the world?”
“You are getting too deep,” the pastor replied. “You don’t need to study the Bible that deeply. I myself don’t study it that much. All you have to do is be honest, lead a good life, and be respectful. Then you will have your reward, wherever that may be.”
“You mean the Bible is only a book of good morals and good manners?” I asked. “Even people that don’t believe in God know they should behave that way!”
I was only 18 years old then, and he was a white-haired, elderly Armenian pastor. Grandmother never went back to the Protestant church after that. She became a Witness, and we were baptized together on August 22, 1948, thus symbolizing the dedication of our lives to Jehovah.
From Mourning to Hope
Mother, my sisters, and I, who used to weep remembering the sad happenings in our family, were now joyfully telling others about the New Order and the resurrection hope. With such an incomparable hope, what should we do? Go back to secular work, taking care of our candy business? Should I become a concert pianist, as had been my goal? Or should I become a full-time proclaimer of the good news of God’s Kingdom?
There was no doubt about it. One month after attending my first large assembly of Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1948, I became a regular pioneer (full-time evangelizer), and shortly afterward my three sisters also became pioneers. What a rewarding way of life this has been!
A new privilege was extended to me in 1953, when I received an invitation to attend the 22nd class of the Gilead School where Jehovah’s Witnesses are trained to be missionaries. But Mother’s health was not very good. One day when the two of us were alone, I said to her: “Mother, if Jehovah asked you to do what he asked Abraham to do, to offer his only son Isaac as a sacrifice, what would you say?”
She paused, and after a while she replied: “I couldn’t say no to Jehovah.”
“Suppose he asked something much easier,” I continued, “that is, to let one of your daughters be a missionary in any part of this world. Would you let her go?”
She said yes. Then I told her I was leaving to be trained as a missionary. My oldest sister, Siranouche, stayed behind to care for our parents.
Being assigned back to Brazil after Gilead, I served for less than two years in Lages, Santa Catarina, where there were only two Witnesses, and I saw the forming of a new congregation. Then in 1956 I was offered a privilege that I have cherished very dearly, that of working in the Brazil branch office of the Watch Tower Society, where I have been serving ever since. Mother never asked me to return home, even when she became a widow in 1962 and had little with which to support herself. She was satisfied with little, and she would write me the most encouraging letters.
After I had been working 20 years in the branch, one of my sisters, Vehanouch, who had attended the 33rd class of Gilead, came to work in the branch too. Now we both work on translation and proofreading.
My other two sisters have also continued in the full-time ministry. Gulemia, the youngest, began as a regular pioneer in 1949 when she was 14 years old, and since 1960 she has been a special pioneer (devoting 140 hours a month to the preaching work). In 1966, after my mother died, my oldest sister, Siranouche, became Gulemia’s partner as a special pioneer. They currently serve in a small town called Caconde, in the heart of the mountains, in the state of São Paulo.
No other work could have given us more joy than proclaiming God’s Kingdom. We thank Jehovah and Christ for using us like the ‘four daughters of Philip.’ (Acts 21:9) The four of us have had the privilege of helping some 400 persons to find this same joy. We have seen the number of Witnesses here in Brazil grow from 1,300 to over 170,000.
Of very special interest to us was what we saw in the Olympic Stadium in Munich, Germany, in 1978, in the Turkish section of the “Victorious Faith” International Convention. It was something that deeply touched our hearts—Armenians and Turks seated together in peace and true love, listening to Bible counsel! After the day’s session was over, who do you think offered to take us in his car to our lodgings? Why, a Turkish Witness! Indeed, Jehovah works miracles!
How many more joys we can have if we remain faithful to our loving Creator! Then we will see the triumph of his Kingdom and be on hand to welcome back our dear ones in the resurrection!—As told by Hosa Yazedjian.
[Blurb on page 16]
Many of the menfolk in Mother’s family were taken away, never to be heard from again
[Blurb on page 17]
‘An end must be put to their existence and no regard paid to scruples of conscience’
[Blurb on page 17]
Since I didn’t want to be influenced by any religion, I refused to read the literature of Jehovah’s Witnesses
[Blurb on page 20]
Armenians and Turks were seated together in peace and love, listening to Bible counsel!
[Pictures on page 18]
Hosa Yazedjian at the Watch Tower headquarters in Brazil where she works