“Never trust a survivor”

“Never trust a survivor” is Rabo Karabekian’s father’s warning about Vartan Mamigonian, the fellow Armenian survivor who exploited the trust of Rabo’s parents. The saying turns survival into no guarantee of virtue: before trusting another survivor, one must learn what he did to stay alive.

Origin in Flight and Exile

The warning grows out of the flight of Rabo’s parents after a massacre. Rabo’s mother escaped with jewels that had fallen from a dead woman’s mouth, while deliberately leaving behind those still inside it. She later insisted on this distinction: the jewels she did not take remained the dead woman’s personal property. The detail gives the family’s later vulnerability a moral as well as practical context; the survivors had endured violence without treating every available object as theirs to claim.

Rabo’s mother crawled away after nightfall, once the killers had gone. She and Rabo’s father came from different villages and met only after crossing the lightly guarded border into Persia, about seventy miles from the massacre. Persian Armenians took them in, and the couple decided to travel together to Egypt. Because his wife had a mouthful of jewels, Rabo’s father did most of the talking. At the Persian Gulf, she sold the first of the compact treasures to pay for passage on a small freighter to Cairo by way of the Red Sea.

The Survivor Who Profited

In Cairo, the couple met Vartan Mamigonian, himself a survivor of an earlier massacre. He had become wealthy manufacturing military boots for both the British and German armies, which were soon to fight one another in World War I. That prosperity did not make him a trustworthy protector. Instead, he offered the newcomers low-paid work of the dirtiest kind, while their shared Armenian identity encouraged them to confide in him.

The couple told Mamigonian about the remaining jewels and their plans to marry and move to Paris, where a large and highly cultivated Armenian community lived. He presented himself as their ardent adviser and protector, supposedly concerned to find a safe place for their valuables in a city notorious for thieves. But the jewels were already deposited in a bank. His solicitude was therefore not the safeguard it appeared to be: it gave him a position of confidence from which he could propose a different plan.

The Warning’s Meaning

Mamigonian constructed a story about San Ignacio, California, and offered it as an opportunity in exchange for the jewels. He claimed to have a brother there and produced forged letters purporting to come from him. The letters described the brother as newly rich and said that many Armenians in the town were doing well; they also advertised a need for a teacher fluent in Armenian and acquainted with its great literature. The account was a fabrication designed to make an unknown farming town sound like a prosperous, welcoming refuge.

Rabo’s father’s warning distills the gap between shared suffering and earned trust. Mamigonian’s own survival could invite solidarity, but it could not establish what he had done to survive—or what he was prepared to do to others. The saying therefore works as more than a rule of caution: it recasts the survivor’s story as something that must be examined, not accepted as proof of character. In the family history, the warning is inseparable from the contrast between the parents’ escape and Mamigonian’s calculated use of their hopes and jewels.