By DAN BILEFSKY
c.2010 New York Times News Service
ISTANBUL – Fethiye Cetin recalled the day her identity shattered.
She was a young law student when her beloved maternal grandmother, Seher, took her aside and told her a secret she had hidden for 60 years: that Seher was born a Christian Armenian with the name Heranus and had been saved from a death march by a Turkish officer, who snatched her from her mother’s arms in 1915 and raised her as Turkish and Muslim.
Cetin’s grandmother, whose parents later turned out to have escaped to New York, was just one of thousands of Armenian children who were kidnapped and adopted by Turkish families during the Armenian genocide, the mass killing of more than a million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1918. These survivors were sometimes called “the leftovers of the sword.”