The Andreyan family of eight was displaced twice in three years. 2020 They lost their house in Taghaser village of Hadrut district, and were forced to leave Stepanakert on September 25, 2023.
2023 On September 19, when the Azerbaijani terrorist units launched an attack along the contact line with Artsakh, Anush’s husband was in positions. Neighbors helped to bring the six children to the basement.
“If they didn’t help, I wouldn’t have been able to take them all by myself. We reached the basement under the explosions and could not get out until the next day. The explosions and machine gun fire could be heard so close, it seemed as if they were in our yard. The children were terrified, they were afraid to sleep, they said, “If we sleep, the Turks will come and massacre us all…” Anoush, a forcibly displaced mother of six children, recalled in an interview with “Pastinfo”.
She did not hear from her husband for almost two days. on the evening of the 20th of the month, only the husband came out.
“On the morning of September 20, we went to the airport with the whole neighborhood. We charged our phones there. before that there was no connection, no light… In a moment, the connection was restored, my husband called, he said: I am alive, I am at the airport, I am looking for you. He didn’t even know where we were, how we were. somehow he found out about our place “through Cherez” and came to look for it…”.
They return home the next day. They didn’t have anything to eat for several days, the children were not only stressed but also terribly hungry.
“A week before the war, the food was completely exhausted. there was not even a piece of bread. On the 23rd-24th of the month, we put a stove in the yard and cooked wheat for the children to eat. When we found out that they serve bread in one of the hotels, my little daughter went and came back with two small loaves of bread. The six children got by with that bread for two days. If it wasn’t for that, they would have fainted on the way, there was no more heat in the tents,” says the mother.
Anush’s 9-year-old daughter, Nvard, has lymph node cancer. During the entire siege, finding food for him was the most difficult thing for the family. The mother remembers that what was available was cereals and black bread, which the girl could not digest either. For a long time he only ate grapes and pomegranates.
“It can be said that a child has been hungry for months. I knocked on ten doors until I got several kilograms of flour, I baked one or two loaves of bread and gave them to eat. We used to eat black bread for a long time,” says Anush.
The Andreyans have now taken refuge in Gyumri. Even after living through hellish days, the children’s minds and hearts are in Artsakh. The mother says that every day they compare the school, the yard… 9-year-old Nvard also says: I want to go to Stepanakert, everything was different there, if only there were no Turks there…
The most important problem that concerns this large family now is the issue of work. Anush’s husband served in the defense army for 17 years, but now he cannot find a job. Anush is now taking hairdressing courses in the hope that she will be able to get the necessary accessories and work as a hairdresser.
(function(d, s, id) {
var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src = “//connect.facebook.net/ru_RU/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.6&appId=403315783090535”;
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, ‘script’, ‘facebook-jssdk’));(function(d, s, id) {
var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src = “//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1&appId=429534133762584”;
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, ‘script’, ‘facebook-jssdk’));