On the morning of September 19, after sending the children to school, Zhanna, a resident of Chartar was preparing for her brother’s wedding. After the 9-month blockade, they decided to have a slightly different day. She was about to go to the beauty salon when the first Azerbaijani shells exploded in the sky of Artsakh.
“It was a 15-minute drive from our house to my mother’s house. I was getting dressed to go out, at that moment my husband was called and told to get ready [for military service]. He asked for his military clothes. We went to my mother’s house, he left me there, he said, “I will come soon, so that nothing happens to any of you” and left:” Zhanna recalls in a conversation with Forrights.am.
Zhanna’s husband, Karen Melkumyan, was a contract soldier in the Armed Forces of Artsakh. She remembers that shots were fired shortly after her husband left. “It is half an hour’s walk from our village to their location; I went there on foot. I saw my husband and brother. My husband wanted to keep me with him, I said no, I should go to the children. At that moment I was psychologically so bad; everything was mixed up in my mind, I have forgotten everything. The sound that rumbled, the first shot – you can’t imagine what it was like.”
Zhanna blames herself for not staying with her husband. She thinks that if she had stayed, her husband would not have perished. “I didn’t listen to anyone: I came under the shells to the children who were at school.”
It was the last meeting of Zhanna and Karen. “I didn’t talk to him again. At the end, he called my little son at 1:10 p.m. He told my son to hide,” says the mother of two children. She has two sons aged 12 and 14.
Zhanna, along with her children, relatives and other Chartar residents, took shelter from enemy fire in a small cellar. “We were crammed in that basement with 50 people. We stayed there all night. I haven’t slept the whole night. We participated in the entire war, we saw and heard everything, what weapons were used, what sounds were coming. On the 20th of the month, we gathered at the neighbor’s house. My daughter and the neighbor’s son came in. My daughter looked at me cautiously. I understood that Karen was killed. I asked where Karen was; she didn’t answer. The neighbor’s wife asked, “Where is Valod? Valod was her son. My brother-in-law said he will come soon. Then we asked my brother, where was Grigori, he didn’t say a word. The fourth said, “And Artak?” He answered, “He will come soon.” We had four victims, one of whom was my husband, the other one was my brother. It was the cruelest day: I will never forget it in my life,” says Zhanna, recalling the harsh days.
In the previous publication, we reported that Zhanna’s brother, Grigori, was buried in Chartar on the day of his wedding, September 22. Her husband’s funeral also took place on the same day.
On September 24, the family was forcibly displaced from Chartar. “My sister came and said, ‘We are leaving…’ It was a terrible journey. We came in a small car… There was no place to sit…,” says Zhanna.
Narek Kirakosyan