The Great Fire (36 page)

T
heodora opened the door of the rooftop locker where she had been huddled with her little sisters. They had been in the locker, a small storage room, for days, hiding from the soldiers who had killed their parents, brothers, and aunt and uncle in the rooms of the house below. The bodies were still there, bloated and the flesh putrefying.

The man who had brought Theodora and her family to the house from the church had left with his family the morning after their arrival. He had given the Gravos family no warning of his departure. They had waked to find themselves alone in the house. The Turkish soldiers had come soon afterward.

It was hard for Theodora to remember how many days had passed since the soldiers had come banging on the door of the house, and her parents, frightened, had sent her and the other two youngest children up the steep stairs to the roof. She knew only that she was very hungry and thirsty. She had not eaten in days, and the only water she had drunk had come from the leaky faucet of a dirty sink in the locker. Staying silent, she had wet the hem of her dress in the puddled water in the sink and brought it to her lips. Each time she drank it she had felt that she would vomit. In the days that the children had hidden in the locker, people had come into the house to take away its contents. Theodora had heard the voices of Turkish women, and the clatter of them taking pots from the
kitchen and chickens from the back of the house. Always, Theodora and her sisters had remained silent in the locker. The baby sister had a bullet wound to one of her feet—it was unclear how this had happened. Had a bullet from one of the Turkish rifles passed through the ceiling of the house? The wound was festering, and it too had a terrible smell but the child remained silent as the house was ransacked.

Theodora heard no sounds on the rooftop and she sensed that there was no immediate danger outside the locker so she stepped out and looked around, down to the street and among the tightly packed homes and shops of Smyrna’s Greek Quarter, near Daragatch. She crossed herself in the manner of an Orthodox Christian: she instinctively put her thumb and first two fingers together and her other two fingers flat on her palm and then she touched her forehead and her stomach, making the tall line of the cross, then she touched her right shoulder and left. The cross was now placed upon her. In church, she often crossed herself—it was what a person did in church.

In peace let us pray to the Lord. Kyrie Eleison, Kyrie Eleison. For the peace of God and the salvation of our souls, let us pray to the Lord. Kyrie Eleison, Kyrie Eleison.

Theodora’s mother had often crossed herself in church and at home. So Theodora did what her mother had done: she placed the cross upon her body for protection. It was what she and her mother did in church.

Theodora looked down from the roof. It made her a little dizzy. The street was empty. This seemed strange to her, though she could not say why for sure. It would have been unusual to see empty streets in Gritzalia—people would be moving about, going to the fields, or returning from the church—and Smyrna was a much bigger village than Gritzalia. It had bigger churches. Maybe it had bigger fields. Smyrna was such a big and strange place to her, and so full of danger. It was not at all like her village where her family had surrounded her, and she knew the small houses and the people who lived in them and even the animals, the goats and the sheep and the little donkeys.

From her perch on the roof, she could see the sea sparkling in the sunshine, and she heard the rumble of people and ships in the distance. She was terrified that a soldier would appear. She waited silently, watching,
and as alert as mouse before it dashes across an open floor. Satisfied that the house was empty, and feeling the pain in her stomach, she decided to take her sisters down the stairs and into the house. They all needed food. She put the younger child on her back and held the hand of the older one. She hurried down the stairs, passed the bodies of her family, and emerged into the light of the street, and when she got there, she saw a group of people—they were speaking Greek—passing hurriedly by. She ran after them.

At the corner, she saw a girl who was sitting upright on a pile of rocks. Theodora wanted to have a friend now. She felt alone. Maybe this girl would be her friend and she could tell her what had happened to her and her family. She approached her and asked how she could find a place to get food. She wanted to talk to someone—and now she had found this girl, but the girl didn’t answer her questions. Theodora walked closer and saw that there was a piece of wood that had been shoved into her body from behind and had reached inside her mouth. It was what had kept her in the sitting position. Theodora could not move when she saw the piece of wood. It was a horrible thing to die this way, and now to see it, this piece of wood that went from her behind to her mouth. Theodora’s mind was telling her to run, but her legs were not listening. They were stone. Then she found that she was running and she came to a church. It was a Greek church. She went inside, but it was full—completely packed with no room inside—and she and her sisters who smelled so badly were pushed out.

Theodora had two possessions, both given to her by her mother—her mother’s purse and a photograph of mother. She looked at them and held them tight, remembering the words of her mother in the house of her father’s friend: “When you see things are getting really bad, throw yourself into the sea.” Theodora didn’t want to throw herself into the sea, and she had her two sisters to care for. They curled like puppies outside the church and slept like puppies on the street.

Theodora awoke for who knows what reason—she had been sleeping in the daylight—and she moved with a crowd of people toward the Quay. She had one child on her back, and she carried the other in her arms. Eventually, they reached the great mass of people, and she sat
down among the throng at the waterfront. She saw Turkish soldiers on the Quay and ships in the harbor. Later, a truck came through and bread was distributed to the crowd. She was able to get a piece, and she shared it with the children.

It was several days later that she heard the people around talking about a fire. It was coming toward them, they said, and they might have to jump into the sea. Theodora smelled the fire before she could see it. In time it reached them and she saw the giant flames. She ran with the others up and down the Quay to escape the heat. She had been sure many times that they would die, but somehow God had delivered them.

Always, she held the children’s hands tightly; always she prayed; and always she remembered her mother. She made the sign of the cross.

Kyrie Eleison, Kryie Eleison.

The days of the fire passed in confusion, and somehow Theodora and her little sisters had survived and they were back on the Quay, and they found a place where they would be given bread to eat and water to drink by people who did not speak Greek, nor any language that she could understand.

A
nd so it went on September 17, 18, and 19—days of utter helplessness and hopelessness.

As the suffering worsened, Powell and his officers began to have trouble making sure the American sailors remained neutral and did not interfere with the Turkish soldiers. The sailors wanted to do something for the refugees.

A sailor posted as a sentry at the American consulate allowed two Greek priests being chased by mounted Turkish soldiers to duck into the consulate building for protection—this was strictly against orders. The priests were Ottoman subjects. Powell put more officers ashore to watch the sailors, but controlling the officers became a problem too. Lieutenant Commander Knauss had helped the two Greek priests who had escaped into the consulate by offering them clothes (in place of their long black gowns and toadstool hats) and a chance to slip out a back door. The sailors also had begun taking Greek and Armenian girls from the Turkish soldiers and escorting them to Jennings.
She’s my girl,
they told the soldiers, and the soldiers surrendered them. Powell did not object—the Turkish soldiers did not put up much trouble in surrendering the girls to the sailors, maybe because there were plenty of others, easily plucked from the crowds. Jennings took them all and found space in his houses. Some of the sailors lingered with Jennings to provide a
uniformed American presence to dissuade the Turks from retrieving the women.

Unfortunately, not all the women were rescued: “From the military bakeries,” Ernest Jacob recounted, “comes direct and detailed testimony of what has been reported from many another place. . . . The Turkish guards took five girls from among the refugees, stripped them, made them dance, violated and then killed them.”

The relief committee continued to distribute food delivered by the destroyers and to provide emergency medical care where it could. The city’s hospitals had been destroyed, and Jennings’s houses were the only sheltered locations for medical care. Refugees suffered from burns, gunshot and bayonet wounds, and rape, and typhus had broken out in the city. The fleas on rats carry the bacterium that causes typhus, and the fire had dispersed the city’s rat population. Cholera, the consequence of the lack of toilets in the city, had also broken out. Weak from hunger, thirst, and fatigue, refugees—especially the oldest and youngest—readily succumbed to the diseases. Rape had left women not only mentally traumatized; they suffered severe physical injures—tearing of tissue, bleeding, and contusions. Some committed suicide. Dr. Post (who had returned from Salonika) cared for pregnant women throughout the city and went out to the refugees on a barge and a derelict schooner anchored in the harbor. He delivered a baby on the barge. A local doctor, Dr. Margoulis, a Jewish resident of Smyrna, assisted him in his medical work. The committee found it difficult to keep track of the locations of the refugees as the Turkish command chased them from place to place, or the refugees moved en masse without notice, driven by terror.

Passenger ships that had regularly called on Smyrna mostly avoided the city now because of the fear of disease, but a trickle of refugees was able to leave by buying passage on the few steamers that had called on the city or on merchant ships chartered by the British, French, and Italians to remove their nationals and protégés. By demanding passports and visas, documents that were next to impossible for refugees to produce, the Turkish army had essentially closed off the possibility of refugees surreptitiously departing on the vessels intended to take away European nationals. In some cases, the French and Italians supplied documents to
refugees who had found a way to make a personal or compelling appeal based on the ability to speak French or Italian. For the overwhelming mass of people there was no escape.

NIGHTS ON THE QUAY
invited terror. Emboldened by the darkness, Turkish soldiers came onto the Quay, looted refugee possessions, and took away girls. There were many more refugees than soldiers, and while the refugees carried only a few household items with them, it was enough to lure soldiers back night after night.

Some of the Allied ships swept the searchlights on their decks over the Quay to disperse the soldiers. Oddly, it worked. The Turkish soldiers seemed not to want to be seen by the Allied and American navies as they preyed on the people. There is probably no better description of the nights on the Quay than the one offered by Ernest Hemingway, through the voice of a British officer, in his short story “On the Quai at Smyrna.”

Hemingway actually never got to Smyrna; he had heard the details from a recently returned British officer, most likely at the bar of Pera Palace Hotel.

While he was in Turkey and Greece Hemingway produced twenty-six chiseled pieces for the
Toronto Star
related to the Greek-Turkish War. The genius of the young novelist rings in each of them. The opening passage of his Smyrna short story matches other first-person Smyrna accounts, though Hemingway’s version distills the suffering into timeless language. If the voice of modern American literature—detached, ironic, cynical, piercing—can be traced to Hemingway, then it is no exaggeration
to say that Hemingway found the expression of that voice, or at least the perfection of that expression, in the suffering at Smyrna.

And so it was: in the daytime, the women grasped their dead children; in the night, the warships in the harbor ran their lights over the crowds to dissuade Turks from the worst of their brutality. The refugees understood this, and when the lights passed over them, they felt a little safer. Their screaming ceased.

ON SEPTEMBER 19
, a dirty and ill-kept tramp steamer, the SS
Treaty of Versailles,
came into Smyrna harbor and dropped its anchor. The Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople, with help from Near East Relief, had chartered the vessel to carry away refugees. It had a British registry, and the senior British naval officer in Smyrna negotiated the ground rules for bringing it to the railroad pier to load refugees. The British officer asked Powell for the assistance of his crew, which Powell eagerly provided, and the ship was loaded with people from the Quay, departing on September 20 for the island of Lesbos. A second British-flagged merchant vessel, the SS
Worsley Hall,
equally foul from carrying cargoes of coal, arrived, and it too was loaded with refugees. The vessels removed forty-eight hundred people to Lesbos, but the departures seemed to make very little difference in the numbers of people on the Quay. The Near East Relief also had arranged for a Russian freighter to steam to Smyrna to carry away refugees, though it would take several days for it to arrive. In addition, Bristol sent a message to Powell that said the SS
Manhattan Island,
an American freighter in Constantinople, would make the trip to Smyrna if an American agent in the city could guarantee a cargo of tobacco. There might also be room for refugees, he said, but the tobacco came first.

Powell estimated that about twenty-five thousand people had been
evacuated in the days since the outbreak of the fire—three thousand by the American ships (the
Litchfield
and the
Winona
on the first night and following day of the fire), six thousand by the French, six thousand by the Italians, and fourteen thousand by the British on British merchant ships carrying away British nationals, as well as the refugees on the SS
Versailles
and
Worsley Hall
. Hundreds of thousands remained. In fact, more people had come into the city than had been removed.

There was next to no food, water supplies were damaged, disease had broken out, but it was the lack of sea transport that proved most troublesome to the relief committee. Evacuation had emerged as the only way to save lives, and the American Relief Committee was the only group trying to get ships. No international effort had been launched, and Bristol was not making an effort in Constantinople. The absence of ships seemed to seal the fate of the people. Jennings continued to minister to the refugees in his houses, but he, like the other relief volunteers, understood that their efforts were not the answer—they were simply buying a little more time until starvation and disease prevailed. “We therefore became more and more anxious and determined for boats,” Jennings explained in a letter afterward. Jennings directed his daily prayers to finding ships.

THEN CAME THE CHILLING EVIDENCE
that the Turks had indeed decided to dispose of the refugees by marching them out of the city. Several days earlier, Jennings, on a trip back to Paradise, had seen Turkish soldiers marching hundreds of refugees eastward, toward the interior. Captain Hepburn had taken note of Jennings’s report, and worried about it, but he had held open the possibility the Turks were marching refugees that Jennings had seen back to their homes.

But additional sightings by American officers made it clear that by September 17, forced deportations had begun. American patrols saw refugees being herded in large groups out of town and eastward toward the mountains and desolate tablelands of the Anatolian interior. Other witnesses confirmed the deportations, and soon the Turks made no secret of it. A feeling of horror descended on the Americans. Dr. Post was among those who had witnessed the Armenian death marches of 1915
and 1916. While running the American hospital in Konya in the fall of 1915, Dr. Post had been one of the missionaries who had alerted Ambassador Morgenthau to the scope of the forced marches with descriptive letters documenting the death and suffering.

The Young Turk government had employed the forced marches to kill hundreds of thousands of Armenian women and children. The killing had begun with Turkey’s entrance into World War I, but the organized top-down orders for the systematic removal of Armenians came in April 1915. The typical method was for soldiers or police to round up Armenians in the cities, towns, and villages where they lived. The roundup then proceeded to the killing—males were killed outside of the settlement by sword or bullet, and women and children were led on long marches to wastelands to the south, deserts in Iraq or Syria. Most died of starvation, thirst, exhaustion, and outright slaughter along the way.

At Trebizond, on the Black Sea, the Italian consulate remembered the scene:

Of the fourteen thousand Armenians who had lived in Trebizond, fewer than one hundred had survived at the time of the Italian consul’s departure.

The nationalists had used similar methods to dispose of Greek and Armenian women and children from towns and cities along the Black Sea and central Anatolia. In May of 1922, Dr. F. D. Yowell, directorr of the Near East Relief unit at Harpoot, a city in central Anatolia, reported, “Conditions of Greek minorities are even worse than those of the Armenians. Sufferings of the Greeks deported from districts behind the battlefront are terrible and still continue. These deportees began to reach Harpoot before my arrival last October. Of thirty thousand Greek refugees who left Sivas, five thousand died on the way before reaching Harpoot. One American relief worker saw and counted fifteen hundred bodies on the road east of Harpoot.”
^*

In Smyrna, the relief committee saw the nightmare of deportations being repeated. The refugees—women, children, and old men in some groups, men of military age in others—were rounded up, formed roughly into lines and marched out of the city, herded along by the Turkish cavalry.

Traveling through the city and estimating the numbers of people in the key concentration areas, Jacob was unable to account for large numbers of people. “It seems almost impossible to estimate how many refugees there are,” he wrote. After the fire, there had been hundreds of thousands on the Quay—and still more in the unburned back sections of the city. He estimated that from 40,000 to 125,000 men had already been deported to the interior. “But,” he asked, “where are the rest?” The answer was that the women and children—as well as the men—were being removed and taken into the backcountry for execution.

The American officers saw the Turkish soldiers collecting and moving the refugees in large groups. There were five roads out of Smyrna, one north, two east, one south, and one along the coast toward Chesme. Relief workers and sailors observed refugees on the roads going east and south—towad Magnesia, Nif, and Paradise. Each day, the numbers of people on the Quay and in the concentration areas fell. Soon, Powell witnessed it himself. “About a thousand refugees were seen being marched
along the waterfront to the southward under a small guard,” Powell recorded in his ship’s diary. “Deportations are continuing and are acknowledged by the Turks.”