Greeks in 1919 and the burning of Smyrna

[Prokomenos]

Greece to the rescue

PPowell tried to convince officials in Thessalonica to send Greek ships to evacuate the refugees, and send the response to Bristol stating that Greeks would abide willingly, if they were guaranteed protection from the Turks. Kemal had said that their were no guarantees and that the Greek ships would enter at their own risk. A few days had passed and Kemal's ultimatum would expire in ten days. " After that, deportation to Asia Minor, months of weary trekking, a perfectly planned program of long drawn out extermination," Jacob wrote. On Tuesday morning Jacob me up with M. Carnier, a French official of the Turkish Public Debt Administration, and he reported that he witnessed the whole of its Christian population in Phocia being deported into the interior and also that he himself had been robbed of his last penny by Turkish soldier escorts sent with him for his " protection."
Observers had agreed that Turkish soldiers and people basically had a license to steal, murder and rape. Hepburn thought that " if they wanted to the Turkish government could establish order in two hours". Each evening the dead would be gathered in a burnt out area behind the new consulate, piled in trucks, and driven inland to be burned. " The order of burning flesh is easily recognizable," wrote Lieutenant Commander Knauss. Asa Jennings wrote: " I have seen men, women, and children whipped, robbed, shot, stabbed, beheaded, and drowned in the sea. And while I helped save some it seemed like nothing as compared with the great need. It seemed as if the awful agonizing, hopeless shrieks of help would forever haunt me."

One day during the early morning a Greek battleship Kilkis had entered the harbor in Smyrna. Jennings found the Captain of the Kilkis eager to co-operate. Together they send word to the authorities in Athens, to send ships fast to rescue the refugees. The Greek authorities had to be assured that they would be protected but nothing was every agreed and regardless the Greeks sent ships. On Saturday it was agreed that ten ships could immediately take hostages on board. By twelve o'clock the evacuation had started. On the 24 of September the Greek fleet with Admiral Jennings who was really a nobody but lied to the Greek and American officials about who he was, had rescued around fifteen thousand old men, women, and children from hell on earth that the city had become in two weeks. By the first of October it is estimated that a total number of one hundred and eighty thousand refugees had been taken from Smyrna, the last ship pulling out exactly six hours before the expiration date. For some strange reason American and the Allies begged the Turks to extend the time to more eight days so that the British and Greek ships might evacuate nearby ports. Sixty thousand more were rescued from the shores of Urla, Chesme and Ayvalik where they had been gathered for two weeks. The whole total number of evacuated refugees was nearly a quarter of a million. The French, Americans and Italians had only rescued their nationals. It was only the Greeks and the British who actually rescued fortunate Greeks and Armenians who escaped a certain death unlike many who didn't.

The magnitude of the operation and its completion within the prescribed time limits enabled the Americans and British navies to cover themselves with glory. The American sailors, no less than the British, deserved to be praised as much for being guilty of many unauthorized acts of humanity, as Dr. Lovejoy had expressed, as for helping to expedite the evacuations. Yet it was difficult, if not impossible, to publicize their humanitarian acts without turning public opinion at home against American policy in Turkey. Certain American churchmen were already badgering the State Department to take a stand on behalf of the Christian minorities, or at the very least to exert strong diplomatic pressures. Secretary of State Hughes responded to these protests by asking Bristol to impress upon Kemalist officials in Constatinople the fact that their minority policy was making it exceedingly difficult to change American public opinion toward Turkey. In reply to the clamour at home, he insisted that the government, " keenly alive to every humanitarian interest... has not failed to take every appropriate action" within limits beyond which the Executive branch could not go without approval from Congress. This did not quiet certain church leaders, who were advocating force if necessary , to save the half million Christians of Constatinople.

The city was now in chaos. Steamship offices were mobbed with prospective customers offering enormous sums for space on louse ridden freighters. Tourists could pick up bargains in anything from amber beads to oriental rugs, as Greek and Armenian merchants unloaded their wares in desperate haste to accumulate foreign currency. The Grande Rue de Pera offered some unusual sights. One man, jogging along with five coffins strapped to his back, explained to an astonished reporter that he was searching for the likely location of a massacre, another man was seen staggering toward the docks carrying a red hot kitchen stove, " the smoke curving gracefully from the chimney". Foreigners took a less sanguine view. Bristol himself was alarmed that the Turks were arming their civilians and thought that the greatest massacre of all time was likely to follow a Turkish occupation of Constatinople. A director of the Board of Missions wrote to his home office that Americans were leaving the city in droves.

[Prokomenos]

Epilogue

Mark Prentiss a reporter for the New York Times, a foreign trade specialist in Smyrna as Bristol's special relief representative, began to show a marked shift in point of view. Although Prentiss did not appear to be an especially sensitive man, he was initially shaken by what he saw; " I have seen terrible sights until my senses are numb, but the sight of two hundred thousand people, mostly women and little children, penned up and burning and those escaping being driven to a bare, devastated country fro starvation, is past all comprehension, but these facts exist." In this first article dated 18 September, Prentiss did not equivocate about the fire:

Many of us personally saw and are ready to affirm the
statement - Turkish soldiers often directed by officers
throwing petroleum in the streets and houses. Vice-Consul Barnes
watched a Turkish officer leisurely fire the Custom House
and the Passport Bureau while at least fifty Turkish
soldiers stood by. Major Davis saw Turkish soldiers throwing
oil in many houses. The Navy patrol reported seeing a complete horseshoe
of fires started by the Turks around the American school.

Prentiss's article went on to describe " one of the most tragic sights of all " four thousand refugees lying on barges near the breakwater, slowly dying of hunger and thirst as British sailors supplying them with water and Americans providing them with food " were forbidden all contact with them." Other reports, most of which did not reach the newspapers, belie Prentiss's unqualified praise of the policing. " 15,000 taken off today in stifling heat and dust amid indescribable, crushing, confusion, robberies, and beating by Turkish soldiers," E.O. Jacob recorded in his diary. Commander Powell concurred: " Brutality and robbery at the gates and in the railroad yard was rather the rule than the exception."

Powell cited Esther Lovejoy as the heroine of the last fateful week. She was the only American woman on the scene and one of three doctors, the others were Dr. Post and a British Navy surgeon who constituted a medical team. From early morning until late at night they were on the piers treating the ill, delivering babies, helping to move the injured. Later Dr. Lovejoy was to relate her experiences in detail, in an autobiographical volume titled Certain Samaritans. She considered it her duty to record her observations in Smyrna with special care, she noted in a letter, because my confidence in history has been so shaken by the misinformation circulated regarding the finish of the Christian minorities in Turkey. Dr. Lovejoy found the powers of language insufficient to the task of description: " Pain, anguish, despair and that dumb endurance beyond despair cannot be expressed in words."

The Turkish authorities had at the end relented and allowed Jennings's ships to dock at the piers by the railroad depot near the Point. Two spiked iron fences with narrow gates separated the quay from the railroad yards, from there the piers extended a long distance to deep water. Across the piers, at intervals of two hundred yards, the Turks had improvised three more fences with openings only three feet wide. In order to reach the ships, women, children, and old men, with any worldly possessions they had managed to retain,- bedding, clothing, a jug of water and perhaps a loaf of bread, cooking pots: items that in some cases would make the difference between death and survival through harsh winter had to file through a double line of Turkish soldiers and pass scrutiny at each of five heavily guarded gates.

The crush at these gates provided the least of their trials, for by now the refugees were numb to discomfort. It was here that the remaining men were torn away, and this last wrench, by a bullet or the stab of a bayonet if resistance was offered, and sometimes for no reason at all, provided the supreme test of endurance for their wives, children, and aged parents. Sometimes the men would be arrested at the first gate, more often they would mangage to bribe their way past the first and the second, only to be captured at one of the last three. Soldiers would beat the men back with the butts of their rifles and last the women forward with canes and straps, all the while shouting " Haide!" "Begone!" " I shall never forget those women with their children clinging to their skirts as they moved backward, step by step, gazing for the last time upon the faces of their husbands and sons" . She described the scene as " the most cruel, cowardly, and unsportsmanlike spectacle that ever passed under the eyes of heaven".

The family of Marika Tsakirides, intact, found it impossible to rejoice amis so much sorrow. " Very few people were so lucky. Almost everyone lost someone. A mother lost a child; a child lost a mother."

Oi Mana xani to paidi
kai to paidi tin Mana

Sources : Marjorie Housepian Dobkin Smyrna 1922, Smoldering Smyrna Lydia Karagianis, Thea Halo Not even my name, The Blight of Asia George Horton