The Great Fire: One American's Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century's First Genocide, by Carl Ureneck (HarperCollins, 2015).
Ureneck's narrative provides a day-by-day account of the Turkish Nationalist army's occupation of Smyrna in September, 1922, and the halting relief effort that eventually rescued over 250,000 Christians (mostly Greeks and Armenians) from the Smyrna quay. The book details the tireless and ingenious efforts of the American Methodist minister Asa Jennings to organize the relief effort and the flotilla of ships that eventually brought the refugees to the Greek islands and mainland, and safety. I could hardly put the book down. And it's also a difficult book to read at times, with many eyewitness accounts of the horrible atrocities committed by the nationalist Turkish soldiers and bands of thugs.
I was first introduced to Reverand Asa Jennings in Giles Milton's fine book about the Smyrna disaster, Paradise Lost. Ureneck gives us much more detail about Jennings, and fills in the man's activities: his searching the choked and dangerous streets for weak and injured refugees, particularly pregnant women, and bringing them to shelters; his efforts, along with other American and European officials, to feed and protect the refugees; his amazing efforts to motivate and bluff American and Greek officials to orchestrate the flotilla of Greek and European ships that eventually saved the traumatized refugees from Smyrna and its environs. All of this done while putting himself in constant danger. I felt inspired by his courage. Given his small physical stature, his mild manner, and the bureaucratic and human obstacles he faced, it would have been easy to turn him into a mythic character, a kind of unapproachable fairy tale character. But Ureneck avoids that, and describes Jennings instead as a fully realized man with strengths and weaknesses who simply was in the right place at the right time to do great work.
There are many interesting stories and side-stories, especially those involving the official American reluctance to get involved with aiding the Christian refugees despite the colossal humanitarian dimensions of the tragedy. Admiral Mark L. Bristol, the U.S. High Commissioner in Constantinople (Istanbul) comes across as being less interested in saving Greek and Armenian lives and more interested in ensuring American financial interests and appeasing the Nationalist Turkish movement headed by Kemal Ataturk -- he wanted America to be on the side of the winner. The American Lt. Commander J.B. Rhodes, on the other hand, is presented as one of the sympathetic figures, a Navy captain who worked with Jennings, and effectively saved people and provided valuable relief to thousands while struggling within the bounds of Bristol's hands-off orders.
Then there are the horrible events. Ureneck uses diary accounts from Jennings himself, Armenian doctor Garabed Hatcherian, Theodora Gravos, a Greek refugee from the interior, and others. They detail scenes of almost unbelievable cruelty. The Greek and Armenian refugees suffered continuous murder, rape, and looting in Smyrna during those weeks in September 1922 (culminating years of atrocities by Nationalist Turks on the Christian populations of Asia Minor). Greeks and Armenians were effectively deported from or exterminated in what is now Turkey.
Here is an excerpt from Ureneck's account of young Theodora Gravos's desparate attempts to escape Smyrna with her family:
At the corner, she saw a girl who was sitting upright on a pile of rocks...Theodora walked closer and saw that there was a piece of wood that had been shoved into her body from behind to her mouth. It was what had kept her in the sitting position.
This and other scenes almost defy credulity. Reading this as a comfortable 21st century Greek-American, who grew up in secure America, it's hard to comprehend the demonic impulse that would compel a human being to do such a thing to a young girl. But the accounts are too many, from this and other books, to not believe them. And they all attest to the same systematic torture and brutality on the part of the Turkish regime. It's not so different from the cruelty exhibited in today's Islamic State killings, live burnings, and beheadings.
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