And, "The young girls, often very young ones, have become the booty of the Musulmans." If they weren't killed, he noted, they were raped and sold into slavery or harems."
But even Bernau had not seen what Aurora Mardiganian experienced north of Aleppo in Diyarbekir, where the killing squads played "the game of swords" with Armenian girls. Having planted their swords in the ground, blade up, in a row, at several-yard intervals, the men on horsebackack grabbed a girl. At the signal, given by a shout, they rode their horses at a controlled gallop, throwing the girl with the intent of killing her by impaling her on a sword. "If the killer missed," Mardiganian writes, "and the girl was only injured, she would be scooped up again until she was impaled on the protruding blade. It was a game, a contest," the trauma-stricken survivor wrote in her memoir, and after the girls were dead, the Turks forced the Jews of the city to gather up the bodies in oxcarts and throw them in the Tigris River.
