[146]. Name of writer withheld.
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.