“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.”