Rosa Khaderian - Survivor of the Armenian Genocide - The Independent, 24 August 2002 by Andrew Kevorkian

Rosa Khederian was one of two known survivors in the United Kingdom of the Armenian genocide in the First World War.

On 24 April 1915, Turkey began the round-up of some 600 Armenian leaders as a prelude to the killing and forcible deportation of two million people from their 3,000-year-old homeland. Rosa, aged two, lost both her parents. Her earliest memory was having her right hand held in a fire by a Turkish soldier. The resulting deformity did not prevent her from pursuing a career as a nanny and, in her "retirement", knitting thousands of blankets and raising money for charities, especially for children and orphans.

An only child, she was born Rosa Pamboukian, into an Armenian/Greek family who were influential in the cotton industry, in Adana, in south-eastern Turkey - at the time one of the world's leading cotton-producing areas. Taken to an orphanage run by Scottish missionaries, she remained there until she was 14. She started training as a nurse in a hospital in Nazareth, but was forced to stop because of ill-health and her deformity. Advised to become a children's nanny, she looked after the children of the Polish consul in Jerusalem. She then worked for several British families.

In time, she became acquainted with a British couple who were journalists in Jerusalem and she looked after their two children. She went with them to Africa when they were assigned there and, late in 1957, she came with them to Britain. When the children were too old for a nanny, she became the companion for their grandmother for the next 21 years. Upon her death, Rosa Khederian finally settled into her own place.

While sitting on a bench outside Holy Trinity Church in Finchley Road, north London, she was invited in and realised that she was in a meeting of the local Save the Children Fund. Asked if she could knit, she said that she could and for the next 20 years she knitted blankets, despite having control of only two fingers on her right hand. Until she became too frail, she estimated that she had knitted thousands of blankets, not only for Save the Children but also for Armenian organisations.

She also collected clothing for orphans and for Armenia, especially after the disastrous earthquake of 1988. Until recently, rain or shine, the slight, small (she was under 5ft tall) figure could be seen outside the St Sarkis Armenian Church, in Kensington, collecting money for one good cause or other. She is estimated to have raised more than £30,000 by this means alone. When she decided that the St Nareg Children's Hospital, in Armenia, needed more beds, she raised £6,000. A ward there was named after her.

Asked why she worked so hard, she replied, "There are people worse off than me . . . If you are not busy, you think about yourself. That is not good. God has given me two hands, so I work."

While in her teens, she married another orphan from her orphanage, but he died within a year. A memorial service will be held for her at St Sarkis Armenian Church on Sunday 1 September. Her ashes will be interred in Armenia.