Reading memoirs with students supports learning about historical events while exploring different eras and geographic locations. Goodbye, Antoura is a powerful memoir about childhood experience of survival during the Armenian Genocide. To prepare students for reading Goodbye Antoura, teachers are advised to introduce the historical and cultural conditions of Ottoman Armenians during the late 1890s and early 1900s.

When World War I began, Karnig Panian was only five years old, living among his fellow Armenians in the Anatolian village of Gurin. Four years later, American humanitarian aid workers found Karnig at an orphanage in Antoura, Lebanon. He was among nearly 1,000 Armenian and 400 Kurdish children who had been abandoned by the Turkish administrators, left at the orphanage without adult care. This memoir offers the extraordinary story of what Karnig endured in those years—as his people were deported from their Armenian homeland, his family died in a refugee camp in the deserts of Syria, and as Karnig himself endured hunger and mistreatment in the orphanage.