Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (44 page)

‘And in all of this,’ wrote Alexis, ‘I watched Smyrna burn from the ship that slowly sailed away.’ Mother and son were taken to Mytilene, where the whole family – including Alexis’s father – were eventually reunited.

Dr Garabed Hatcherian had spent the night with the Atamian family, helping to nurse Mrs Atamian’s baby, who had been born two days earlier. However, by mid-morning, the house looked set to be engulfed by the flames. Clearly, it was too dangerous to remain there any longer. The respective families bid tearful farewells to each other, packed up a few belongings and prepared to join the refugees on the quayside.

‘The fire continues its devastation and has swallowed everything up to the Swedish consulate,’ wrote Garabed, who had spent the previous twenty-four hours indoors. ‘We find ourselves trapped between three deadly elements: fire, sword and water. We are in a completely desperate situation.’

For days, the family had been sheltered from the worst of the reality of what was taking place in the city. Now, realising that they were no better off than anyone else on the quayside, Hatcherian’s wife and children broke down in tears. ‘I join their lamentation,’ wrote Garabed, ‘and confess that I am the only one to be blamed and, with tearful eyes, I ask for forgiveness . . . We have given up hope of swimming. The fire, the shootings and the cudgel of the Turks have squeezed the Christian crowd from three sides. If there is a ray of hope, it is the sea.’

The Hatcherians fought their way through to the sea wall, where an Italian lighter was taking off refugees. ‘We implore the seamen in French to accept us as well,’ wrote Garabed. ‘But they turn a deaf ear to our pleas and soldiers lined in double rows throw us out readily.’

He was most upset to see a film crew making a movie from the safety of one of the warships and was even more disgusted to see them refusing to help those who had swum out to their ship. ‘They reject those who approach them even by swimming or rowing to ask for refuge, just because they want to demonstrate their political neutrality.’

Hatcherian was at an absolute loss as to what to do. The family had very little food or water and no prospect of any shelter that night. The air was still ferociously hot and great clouds of acrid smoke hung over the quayside. For three hours, the Hatcherians pushed through the crowds of refugees, begging to be rescued by one of the few foreign lighters still involved in the relief operation. But each time they were met with a blank refusal.

Hatcherian feared for his little daughter, Vartouhi, anxious that she might not survive the ordeal. ‘Until midday we wander along the shore under the burning rays of the sun, hungry and thirsty,’ he wrote. ‘We realise that there is no way out from here. We are dead tired and unable to walk.’

The scale of the devastation left him stunned. All the once-grandiose consulates, clubhouses and theatres were now burned-out shells. Even the Grand Hotel Kraemer Palace had been engulfed by the fire and thick black smoke was still pouring out of its upper windows.

‘Amongst the charred buildings, our attention is drawn to the gutted Théâtre de Smyrne which, even as a skeleton, still holds high its imposing façade . . . We pass by it in horror and haste, fearing that its sudden collapse could crush our desperate heads.’

Yet amidst the devastation, a few lone buildings had escaped the flames. At the Point, in the north of the city, a short row of waterfront buildings remained unscathed. Elsewhere, single houses or offices remained upright in defiance of the fireball. There was no obvious reason why they had been spared: a sudden change in the wind’s direction, perhaps, or thick retaining walls that had managed to resist the flames. Each of these buildings was crowded with refugees – men, women and children who preferred to remain inside than chance their lives on the quayside.

Garabed wished that he had been able to remain in the relative safety of the Atamians’ house, although that too might even now be in flames. He and his family spent another hour pushing their way through the crowds, wondering whether they would ever find safety. ‘On the quay, along with household items, one can see valuable objects and human corpses strewn everywhere and we walk through, almost stepping on them. Our noble feelings are worn out, and selfishness has become the only force guiding our existence.’

The wind had whipped up a gale and sheets of spray were blowing in off the sea, providing some relief from the intense heat of the fire. As the Hatcherians dodged bands of irregulars who were menacing the refugees, Garabed reflected on the wretched turn of events that had engulfed his family and friends who were lost among the crowds of the quayside. ‘Only a few hours ago, most of these unfortunate people had all the means of livelihood and enjoyments,’ he wrote; ‘now, deprived from everything, they have been cast into the streets without protection and without hope.’

At teatime that afternoon, as she sat alone with silence all around her, Hortense Wood had a most surprising visitor to her mansion in Bournabat. ‘Arrival of Fazil [Fevzi] Pasha and his staff,’ she recorded in her diary. ‘Ask for rooms for himself and eight officers.’

This was an extraordinary request from an extraordinary man. Fevzi Pasha had joined Mustafa Kemal’s staff two years earlier, serving as Minister for Defence and deputy prime minister for the nationalists in Angora. Now he was marshal of the Turkish army and had come to Smyrna to help Kemal plan his drive northwards towards Constantinople.

Most people would have been flattered to have such a guest staying. Not so Hortense. ‘I said I expected the return of my people in a day or two,’ she told him, ‘and could not give up my sisters’ rooms.’

Fevzi Pasha’s reaction to this refusal is nowhere recorded; he was perhaps bemused by the indefatigable Hortense. Yet he persisted in his request, aware that most of the other great houses in Bournabat had been reduced to smouldering ruins. In the end, Hortense relented, telling him that she ‘could only place two rooms at his disposal’.

Fevzi Pasha gratefully accepted and informed his staff that they would have to find lodgings elsewhere. ‘He did not wish to annoy me, he said.’ Nevertheless, Hortense left him in no doubt that she found his request somewhat intrusive. ‘I had to give up Ernest’s room,’ she wrote with more than a hint of indignation in her diary, ‘
and
the two rooms I had already offered him.’

However, she changed her tune when she realised why Fevzi Pasha had chosen her house. Over the coming days, it was to become the central meeting point for Mustafa Kemal and all his senior advisors. Hortense would find herself playing host to the builders of modern Turkey.

As the afternoon wore on, more and more of the warships slipped away from Smyrna. Some headed for the nearby Greek islands, where they offloaded their cargo of distressed refugees. Others – like the American destroyer,
Simpson
– headed for Salonica or Piraeus.

‘I found Piraeus, as well as Athens, already crowded to saturation with refugees from Turkey,’ wrote George Horton. He rightly foresaw another humanitarian disaster. Greece, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy after more than three years of war with Turkey, was simply not equipped to deal with an influx of tens – and perhaps hundreds – of thousands of refugees.

The sight of the departing ships filled those left behind with a sense of foreboding. They were being abandoned by the great powers and left to the mercy of the Turkish army. Hovakim Uregian toyed with the idea of organising some sort of resistance, reasoning that if he and a few others could overpower some armed Turks and steal their guns, then they might be able to fight back. In the end, his idea came to nothing. ‘My Greek is very limited,’ he wrote, ‘and very few Greeks speak any Armenian. We could communicate in Turkish but the continued attacks of the Turks and the need to keep shifting to survive give us little opportunity to organise this sort of action.’

Krikor Baghdjian – who had seen the Turks setting the fire from the roof of the Armenian clubhouse – had decided to do everything in his power to make his escape. His first attempt to reach a British destroyer ended in disaster when the lighter, filled to overflowing, capsized and sunk. Baghdjian was fortunate to be a strong swimmer and to make it back to the shore. His second attempt was more successful. He bribed his way onto a little rowing boat that soon approached an Italian merchant vessel.

‘At long last we reached its side,’ he later recalled, ‘but, to our horror, we saw the rope ladder being pulled up. Two of us climbed up the side of the ship and I caught the ladder. Two people caught hold of my legs and we were hung up in the air for a while looking down.’

Krikor began to lose his grip, on account of the weight of the people clinging to his legs. ‘But my father pushed them up from the boat as it reached the top of a wave and I secured a better grip. More boat passengers started to climb up the side of the ship and finally, Italian seamen helped us all reach the deck.’

When Krikor was finally on board, his legs gave way beneath him. Others, too, collapsed from the exertion. ‘We all lay exhausted on our backs, breathing and looking at the reddening evening sky, as we thanked our lucky stars for having finally made it – to safety and freedom.’

By the time that darkness fell on that Thursday evening, some 20,000 souls had been plucked from the quayside, yet this had made scarcely a dent in the multitude still camped out. Nor did the savagery show any signs of abating. When the American vice-consul, Maynard Barnes, ventured ashore briefly that evening, he witnessed five separate groups of Turks, armed with blood-smeared clubs, prowling through the crowd. ‘The proceeding was brutal beyond belief,’ he recalled when interviewed after the event. ‘We were within ten feet of the assailants when the last blow was struck, and I doubt there was a bone unbroken left in the body when it was dropped over the edge of the quay and kicked into the sea.’

The fire was still burning fiercely, even though many parts of the city had been reduced to rubble. The wind had shifted direction once again that evening, driving the flames into areas that had hitherto escaped the inferno. ‘At the time when we weighed anchor,’ wrote Helena van der Zee of that Thursday evening, ‘the city of Smyrna was nothing but a vast blaze. Our offices were burning also. Corpses were floating around our boat. It was a macabre spectacle.’

Like the Whittalls and the Girauds, the van der Zee family had done much to create this once-vibrant city. Now, the work of three generations had come to an abrupt and violent end, and Helena had serious doubts as to whether the family would ever return to Smyrna. ‘And thus was said farewell to this diabolical spectacle and to this poor city,’ she wrote, ‘where life had always been so sweet that it had long been known as the Pearl of the Orient.’

Friday, 15 September – Monday, 18 September 1922

D
awn arrived late on Friday, 15 September. A dense pall of smoke hung over Smyrna, obscuring the morning sunshine. The fire still raged with terrific intensity in the farthest-flung quarters of the city. Elsewhere, there was little left to burn. Apart from a few lone buildings, fully three-quarters of the city was no longer standing. Only the railway sidings at the Point, the Standard Oil refinery and the Turkish quarter remained intact.

The rescue operation – now into its second night – had continued throughout the small hours, yet the quayside was still densely packed with people. It is hard to compute with any certainty the exact number who remained trapped there on Friday morning. In his report to Washington, Admiral Mark Bristol reckoned that there were less than a third of a million, even though the number of refugees who had entered the city over the previous days was considerably higher than this. Bristol had also neglected to factor in the city’s Christian population – perhaps 300,000-strong at the time of Kemal’s entry – many of whom were now homeless. According to many eyewitnesses, there were as many as half a million refugees still awaiting their fate on the quayside.

Many had been driven to distraction by hunger and thirst, living off the meagre supplies that they had managed to salvage from their homes. Others were surviving by eating scraps of refuse that were strewn across the quay. There were some for whom the continued predations of the Turkish military had proved too much to bear; quite a number had thrown themselves into the sea in order to escape the horror. When Georgios Tsoubariotis left his graveyard hiding place that Friday morning and made his way to the quayside, his eyes met with a most disturbing sight. ‘The sea was full of bodies . . .’ he wrote. ‘There were so many that if you fell into the water you wouldn’t sink because all those bodies would keep you on the surface. And you could see on every body the belly swollen, curving above the surface.’

Even more gruesome was the fact that dozens of young Turkish boys were swimming among the corpses in order to rob them of anything of worth. ‘Their noses were covered by scarves tied on the back of their heads, so they wouldn’t breathe in the stench of rotting bodies,’ he wrote. ‘They held a sharp knife and skilfully cut from the bodies the fingers that wore rings, and the ends of the ears that wore earrings, to take those jewels. They took bracelets and anything of worth they might find around people’s necks.’