Rosa Khaderian - The Guardian, 11 September 2002 by Monica Wilson
Roza Khaderian, who has died aged 89, was no celebrity. She was a tiny, bird-like old lady who had been a nanny or a housekeeper in London since the 1960s. But her funeral service was taken by the Armenian archbishop, His Grace Yeghishe Gizirian, the primate and Armenian pontifical legate of Great Britain, Grace Bishop Hovhannisian, and two Armenian priests.
For Roza was the last but one person in Britain to have survived the genocide of some 1m Armenians by the Turks in 1915. Both her parents had been murdered, and her own right hand was claw-like because it had been held in a fire by the soldiers.
But Roza was no victim. For years, without help, she collected money for Save the Children and, after the 1988 Armenian earthquake, £30,000 for Armenian orphans. She also knitted thousands of brightly coloured blankets for both organisations, despite her crippled hand.
| "For Roza was the last but one person in Britain to have survived the genocide of some 1m Armenians by the Turks in 1915" |
| Monica Wilson |
Her life was not what her parents - her father was a prosperous cotton merchant in Adana - would have hoped for. After their murder, she was taken by Scottish missionaries to orphanages, first in Syria, and then in northern Palestine. She had hoped to train as a nurse, but her hand made that impossible. At 17, she married a boy from the orphanage, who, sadly, died within a year.
While working in the Polish consulate in Jerusalem in the mid-1950s, she was recommended as a nanny for my two children. When they grew older, she became my mother's housekeeper. After the Armenian earthquake, she more or less ended her work for Save the Children, believing it more important to help the orphans of that catastrophe by rattling her red collecting box on trains and buses, in parks and every Sunday outside the Armenian Church of St Sarkis, in west London.
A ward in the children's hospital built on the site of one destroyed in the Armenian earthquake was named after Roza. A photograph of her standing next to the British ambassador at the opening ceremony became her most valued possession. She ended her life contentedly in a local authority home, where, last Christmas, she stood up and sang, at the top of her voice, her favourite hymn,"God from whom all blessings flow."
· Roza Khaderian, charity worker, born August 21 1912; died August 10 2002.