During the Armenian Genocide my grandmother, Aguline Tatoulian, shaved off her hair and dressed herself in men’s fatigues in order to protect herself and defend her city of 35,000 people.  The women were being raped and the city was pillaged by the Turks.

Grandmother Aguline was shot in her left rib and lived with that bullet for 67 years. She was only one of nine women who survived the massacres of Hadjin in 1918.

Several months after all of this horror, she wrote and staged a play to raise relief funds for survivors.

Before she died in 1985 she requested she not be buried with a Turkish bullet in her body. The doctors removed it and that bullet now is on display in a museum in Armenia.

As told by Lory Tatoulian.