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In a recent 60 Minutes segment about the 1915 mass deportation and massacre of Armenians by Turks, professor Peter Balakian traveled with a CBS News crew to a region of Syria known as the Armenian Auschwitz.

“As many as 450,000 Armenians died here,” Balakian, a leading scholar on the Armenian genocide, told 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon as they stood at the site of a mass grave.

Scratching the surface of the sand, Balakian and Simon discovered fragments of bone.

“Evidence comes in many forms,” he said. “It comes in photographs, it comes in texts and telegrams, and it also comes in bones.”

The 60 Minutes report, “,” chronicled the debate about whether the killings should be officially labeled genocide.

Balakian has spent decades unraveling his Armenian ancestry and, in the process, educating the world about the atrocities of the Armenian genocide.

He is the author of nine books including Armenian Golgotha: Witness to the Armenian Genocide (2009), a translation of his great-uncle’s account of the genocide.

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