108. AFIUN KARA HISSAR: LETTER, DATED MASSACHUSETTS, 22nd NOVEMBER, 1915, FROM AN AMERICAN TRAVELLER; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.
Mr. and Mrs. A., Miss B., a Greek student from our College who wished to come to America to study, my husband and I left BO., and, after travelling all day and night, reached Afiun Kara Hissar about nine o’clock the next morning. We had three hours to wait in Kara Hissar, so we took a carriage at the station and drove to the home of an Armenian doctor there—a well educated, fine young doctor, whom we had met on our previous visit to Kara Hissar. We found his wife and two small children at home, but the doctor had been taken a year ago to work for the wounded Turkish soldiers.
The wife had heard of the exiling of all the Armenians from different towns around her, and so she was packing a few things to take with her when her hour came to go. That hour arrived while we were in her home. All the Armenians were ordered to be at the station in twenty-four hours, to be sent—where? They did not know, but they did know that they had to leave everything—the little homes they had worked for for years, the few little things they had collected—all must be left to the plunder of the Turks.
It was one of the saddest hours I ever lived through; in fact, the hours that followed on the train, from Kara Hissar to Constantinople, were the saddest hours I ever spent.
I wish I could picture the scene in that Armenian home, and we knew that in hundreds of other homes in that very town the same heart-breaking scenes might be witnessed.
The courage of that brave little doctor’s wife, who knew she must take her two babies and face starvation and death with them. Many began to come to her home—to her, for comfort and cheer, and she gave it. I have never seen such courage before. You have to go to the darkest places of the earth to see the brightest lights, to the most obscure spot to find the greatest heroes.
Her bright smile, with no trace of fear in it, was like a beacon light in that mud village, where hundreds were doomed.
It was not because she did not understand how they felt; she was one of them. It was not because she had no dear ones in peril; her husband was far away, ministering to those who were sending her and her babies to destruction.
“Oh! there is no God for the Armenians,” said one Armenian, who, with others, had come in to talk it over.
Just then a poor woman rushed in to get some medicine for a young girl who had fainted when the order came.
Such despair, such hopelessness you have never seen on human faces in America.
“It is the slow massacre of our entire race,” said one woman.
“It is worse than massacre!” replied another man.
The town crier went through all the streets of the village, crying out that anyone who helped the Armenians in any way, gave them food, money or anything, would be beaten and cast into prison. It was more than we could stand.
“Have you any money?” my husband asked the doctor’s wife. “Yes,” she said; “a few liras; but many families will have nothing.”
After figuring out what it would cost us all to reach Constantinople, we gave them what money we had left in our small party. But really to help them we could do nothing, we were powerless to save their lives.
Already the Turks had taken our American school and church, and after a big procession through the streets had dedicated our church as a mosque and turned our school into a Turkish school—taken down the Cross and put up the Crescent.
Some weeks before, they had exiled our faithful Armenian pastor, who for a great many years had toiled there, as he himself told us, “to make a little oasis in that desert.”
For many weeks Mr. C. of our College in BO. had stayed in Kara Hissar to try and get back our church and school, but nothing could be done. The Turks had named our church “Patience Mosque,” because, they said, they had waited so many years to get it.
It was with broken hearts that we left the town, and hardly had we started on our way when we began to pass one train after another crowded, jammed with these poor people, being carried away to some spot where no food could be obtained. At every station where we stopped, we came side by side with one of these trains. It was made up of cattle-trucks, and the faces of little children were looking out from behind the tiny barred windows of each truck. The side doors were wide open, and one could plainly see old men and old women, young mothers with tiny babies, men, women and children, all huddled together like so many sheep or pigs—human beings treated worse than cattle are treated.
About eight o’clock that evening we came to a station where there stood one of these trains. The Armenians told us that they had been in the station for three days with no food. The Turks kept them from buying food; in fact, at the end of these trains there was a truck-full of Turkish soldiers ready to drive these poor people on when they reached the Salt Desert or whatever place they were being taken to.
Old women weeping, babies crying piteously. Oh, it was awful to see such brutality, to hear such suffering.
They told us that twenty babies had been thrown into a river as a train crossed—thrown by the mothers themselves, who could not bear to hear their little ones crying for food when there was no food to give them.
One woman gave birth to twins in one of those crowded trucks, and crossing a river she threw both her babies and then herself into the water.
Those who could not pay to ride in these cattle-trucks were forced to walk. All along the road, as our train passed, we saw them walking slowly and sadly along, driven from their homes like sheep to the slaughter.
A German officer was on the train with us, and I asked him if Germany had anything to do with this deportation, for I thought it was the most brutal thing that had ever happened. He said: “You can’t object to exiling a race; it’s only the way the Turks are doing it which is bad.” He said he had just come from the interior himself and had seen the most terrible sights he ever saw in his life. He said: “Hundreds of people were walking over the mountains, driven by soldiers. Many dead and dying by the roadside. Old women and little children too feeble to walk were strapped to the sides of donkeys. Babies lying dead in the road. Human life thrown away everywhere.”
The last thing we saw late at night and the first thing early in the morning was one train after another carrying its freight of human lives to destruction.
Another man on the train said that in one train he was in the mothers begged him to take their children to save them from such a death.
He said that an Armenian, a leading business man in Harpout, told him that he would rather kill his four daughters with his own hand than see the Turks take them from him. This Armenian was made to leave his home, his business and all he had and start off with his family to walk to whatever place the Turks desired to exile him to.
When we reached a station near Constantinople, we met a long train of Armenians that had just been exiled from Bardezag.
My husband and Mr. A. talked with one of the native teachers from our American school. Among other things he said that an old man was walking in the street in Bardezag when the order came to leave. The old man was deaf and did not understand what was going on, so, because he made no move to leave the town, the soldiers brutally shot him down in the street. The teacher said he could buy no food, for the soldiers kept them from buying any.
The crying of those babies and little children for food is still ringing in my ears. On every train we met we heard the same heart-rending cries of little children.