Joe Manganiellois sharing his great-grandmother’s harrowing survival story from the Armenian Genocide.
In PEOPLE’s exclusive look at Tuesday’sFinding Your Rootsepisode, theMagic Mikeactor shares the heartbreaking events that his great-grandmother previously endured.
“The Turks came into her home in 1915 under the guise of World War I and tried to enact the genocide that they had begun,” he says. “They shot her husband dead, shot her. She laid on the ground, pretended that she was dead while seven other gunshots that went off, which were her seven children.”
Kevin Winter/Getty
By playing dead, his great-grandmother was able to evade suspicion from the intruders. “She laid there unmoving and the Turks left the house and left the eighth child, who was an infant in the crib, to starve to death, which is just the way that they did business,” Manganiello, 46, explains.
“For people who don’t know, there were these death marches where they would just handcuff, chain the Armenians together and march them out to the desert, and release the Kurds, give them military coats, horses and guns, to then go do what they wanted with their mortal enemies, the Armenians,” he says. “She escaped that.”
PBS
While fleeing, Manganiello’s great-grandmother had to swim across the Euphrates river. Upon making it to the other side, she discovered her youngest child had drowned on her back.
As in episodes past,Finding Your Rootsuses DNA technology to reveal the ancestry of celebrities. The series promises some unexpected discoveries as they retrace stars' family trees.
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Manganiello’s story will appear alongside that of former football tight endTony Gonzalezon Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET on PBS.
source: people.com
