“Aurora” is about Arshaluys Mardikian (later Aurora Mardiganian), an Armenian girl who survived the Armenian Genocide. She was 14 when in the summer of 1915 the wave of massacres and deportations reached her home province of Kharberd. Surviving the massacres and going through all the horrors of the Armenian Genocide, Arshaluys fled to Tbilisi (then called Tiflis), then to Petrograd. She then moved to Norway and subsequently to New York.
It was in New York that Mardigian began to write about her story, which drew public attention throughout the United States. Her book of memoirs, “Ravished Armenia,” was soon adapted as a motion picture of the same name, but also alternatively titled as “Auction of Souls,” in which Mardigian played as herself.
