Aurora Mardiganian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide of 1915–1923,
recalled sixteen young Armenian girls being "crucified" by their Ottoman tormentors.
The film Auction of Souls (1919), which was based on her book Ravished Armenia, showed the victims nailed to crosses.
However, almost 70 years later Mardiganian revealed to film historian Anthony Slide that the scene was inaccurate.
She described what was actually an impalement.
She stated that
"The Turks didn't make their crosses like that. The Turks made little pointed crosses.
They took the clothes off the girls.
They made them bend down, and after raping them, they made them sit on the pointed wood, through the vagina.
That's the way they killed – the Turks.
Americans have made it a more civilized way.
They can't show such terrible things."
"When each had been assigned to her cross, she disrobed behind it, and, while the thousand extra people gazed curiously,
each girl was lifted to the position of her 'crucifixion' and fastened in palce with concealed ropes.
Until sundown, there were rehearsals, false moves, rearrangements, and mishaps – until just before the light faded the scene was finally taken."
Two days later one of the models, Corinne Gray, was stricken with influenza, and died after a few more days.
