Gennady Grigoryan married right after the end of the 44-Day War, after returning from the front line. Three years later, he appears on the front line again, remains under siege for days, miraculously survives and dies on September 25, together with his younger brother, during the gas station explosion.
Gennady’s widow, 24-year-old Anahit Grigoryan, lives in Oshakan village of Armenia now, with their 2-year-old son.
The displaced young woman from the Sarushen village of Askeran (NK) recalls how on September 19, when the women and children of the village hid in the nearby forests as a result of the Azerbaijani military operations, Gennady accompanied them with several other men.
“They took us to Msmna village of Martunu region of NK. We stayed there for a few hours, but we realized that it is dangerous there too: they took us to Stepanakert… All this was organized by our village head, who was already injured at that time, was in a very serious condition, but organized everything. “If he didn’t do that, we would have met the Azerbaijanis in those forests and I don’t know what would have happened,” the woman says.
According to Anahit, from there the women were moved to the basements of Stepanakert, the men stayed in Msmna, then went to Nngi. “The men in Nngi, including my husband, were surrounded for several days until the Russian peacekeepers took out the survivors. The peacekeepers went there with high officials of the Azerbaijani side, as well as our high officials. My husband told me later about it. He said that the Russian peacekeepers said that they should disarm, that the army no longer exists, the army has been destroyed, so they should hand over their weapons want to be taken to a safe place. And they were transferred to Stepanakert.”
For two days after that, the men of the family looked for fuel so that they could leave Artsakh by car.
“We left my husband’s car in our village. We had a friend who said, if you find fuel, go out with your car. Well, it was a blockade, there was no fuel. On September 25, they were told that there was a large amount of fuel in a warehouse. Gennady went with his father and his 15-year-old brother, Aren. Then we learned the news of the explosion… Nothing happened to my mother-in-law, although he said that he was standing ahead of the boys. The explosion was very strange, standing position did not matter [for the consequences]. After coming out of the shock, my father-in-law started looking for the boys, but he didn’t find them,” says Anahit.
According to her, Aren called his family that evening. “Perhaps the child was anesthetized, he could speak, but he died that night. Then it turned out that he was 92 percent burned… There was no news about Gennady. They posted on social media, I contacted the Red Cross, my father-in-law visited hospitals once a week to get news, we did DNA analysis… it turned out that my husband died on the day of the explosion. We found his body through DNA test.”
Ani Gevorgyan