“Cries Ringing in My Ears”

The following letter was written by a woman from the United States who was traveling with her husband by train. Her train had a three-hour stop in the town of Kara Hissar in western Anatolia.

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. . . .

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. . . .

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. . . .

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. ¹

Discussion Questions

1. Who in this reading was in the position to act in response to the crimes being committed against Armenians?
2. What could this person or group have done in order to stop or prevent acts of violence against Armenians? What options for action might have been available to them?
3. Why might their decision about how to respond have been difficult to make? What dilemmas did they face?
4. What did the person or group ultimately do?
5. Why do you think they made this choice?

• 1 Viscount Bryce, The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915–1916 (London: H.M.S.O., 1916), Annex A. 92–93.