Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (49 page)

‘From the deck of the
Litchfield
after dark, the ruins of Smyrna seemed as spectral and fantastic as a nightmare,’ she wrote. ‘I could not see the public huddled at the north end of the quay in the angle they dreaded so terribly, but I knew they were there and that later in the night they would shriek for search lights.’

She also knew that their suffering was almost at an end, and that they would have only a few more days to wait before they would finally be free.

Aftermath

E
sther Lovejoy was correct in thinking that the remaining refugees on the quayside would soon be rescued. Within days of her departure, the last of them were finally liberated. For the first time since 6 September, silence reigned over the Smyrna waterfront. The only reminders of the horrors that had taken place were the corpses, the piles of discarded belongings and the haunting backdrop of the burned-out city.

The total death toll is hard to compute with any certainty. According to Edward Hale Bierstadt – executive of the United States Emergency Committee – approximately 100,000 people were killed and another 160,000 deported into the interior. ‘It is a picture too large and too fearful to be painted,’ he wrote in his 1924 study of the disaster,
The Great Betrayal
, although he did his best, interviewing numerous eyewitnesses and collecting their testimonies. Other estimates were more conservative, claiming that 190,000 souls were unaccounted for by the end of September. It is unclear how many of these had been killed and how many deported, although Greek sources suggest that at least 100,000 Christians were marched into the interior of the country. Most of these were never seen again. Among those who did eventually make it to Greece were Panagiotis Marselos and his brother who had suffered a terrible ordeal at the hands of their Turkish guards. They made their way to Piraeus before settling in the countryside around Patras.

Almost all of Smyrna’s other survivors were also taken to Greece where they hoped to build their lives afresh, but their initial optimism was quickly replaced by a grim reality. They were penniless, unemployed and homeless; most were treated as third-class citizens.

Athens bore the brunt of the influx; makeshift encampments sprang up right across the city and were to remain in situ for many years to come. ‘Public schools were turned into hospitals [and] town halls were used as barracks,’ wrote Henry Morgenthau, America’s former ambassador to Turkey. ‘Even the beautiful National Opera House . . . was filled with refugees, each of which had its velvet-lined boxes becoming the home of a whole family.’

Morgenthau described once-prosperous families who were now walking around in ‘shoes made of pieces of discarded automobile tyres’. Their clothing, cobbled together from flour sacks, ‘was a fashion born of necessity’.

The refugees found it difficult to settle in Athens, which was a fraction of the size of Smyrna and had none of its charm. There were many, particularly among the Armenian community, who felt that they would be better off building their lives in a different country. They would eventually emigrate to America, Canada or elsewhere in Europe where they founded little communities that they named after their former neighbourhoods in Smyrna.

Rose Berberian and her family went to Marseilles, where they were helped out of their penury by the Sisters of Mercy. They shared and relived the stories of their momentous last days in Smyrna. Rose’s brother told how he had swum out to a British destroyer, only to have scalding water thrown over him by the crew. He had then swum farther out into the bay, to an Italian vessel, where he was finally given sanctuary. Rose, her brother and sister were young enough to put the terrible events behind them, but Rose’s mother continued to mourn the death of a husband she had last seen on Friday, 8 September 1922.

Garabed Hatcherian and his family headed to Salonica, where Garabed eventually found work as a physician. They lived there until the 1950s, when the family emigrated to Argentina. Forty years were to pass before Garabed’s granddaughter, Dora, learned of the existence of his diary, describing the last days of Smyrna. She was so moved by what she read that she published the manuscript – first in Armenian and then in an annotated English translation, complete with biography and detailed introduction.

Aristotle Onassis fared rather better than many of Smyrna’s refugees. He stayed in Greece where he would later become famous as one of the world’s richest shipping tycoons. He returned briefly to Smyrna in 1955 in order to make a pilgrimage to the family’s villa in the suburb of Karatash. The house had been taken over by a Turkish family who invited him inside. Aristotle was surprised to find that the rooms were still furnished with the belongings of his childhood.

The Smyrna refugees who remained in Athens would eventually congregate in an area of the city that they called Néa Smírni (New Smyrna). Yet there was none of the liveliness of the old city and poverty remained a constant worry. Many never recovered from the loss of all their wordly possessions.

Venizelos’s maligned city governor, Aristeidis Stergiadis, did not dare to return to Greece and face the wrath of his motherland. After escaping from Smyrna, he headed to the South of France where he lived the rest of his life in exile. He became a convenient scapegoat for Venizelos’s failed foreign adventure. To this day, he remains a reviled figure in Greece.

The other senior Greek politicians and generals involved in the latter stages of the Asia Minor campaign were arrested and put on trial. Eight were accused of high treason; six of them were sentenced to death by firing squad. Among them was the half-deranged General Hatzianestis, who had spent so much of his time decorating his waterfront mansion in Smyrna.

Venizelos himself managed to escape censure for his role in the Asia Minor debacle. Chimerical as ever, he argued that everything had gone according to plan while he had been at the helm. His political career was far from over; in the coming weeks and months, he was to play a leading role in negotiations with Kemal’s nationalists.

The other principal players in the Smyrna catastrophe found their lives transformed by what they had seen. George Horton returned to America and began writing a highly personal account of everything he had witnessed. The resulting book,
The Blight of Asia
, was published in 1926. It was forthright in its criticism both of the Turks and of the policy of the American government. Not surprisingly, Horton’s book was heavily criticised by the American establishment.

Horton’s
bête noire
, Admiral Mark Bristol, remained pro-Turkish to the end, urging the State Department not to get involved in the refugee crisis in Greece. American bureaucrats read his memos with interest and declared themselves ‘inclined to agree’. Much of their aid went to Mustafa Kemal’s Turkey.

A handful of people decided to return to Smyrna. Grace Williamson went back in October 1922 in order to restart her nursing work, but shortly after landing in the city she was arrested by the Turkish military and then locked up in the police headquarters. She was fortunate to escape with her life. ‘I am now very certain that we shall not be able to live in Smyrna for years, if ever,’ she wrote.

Alexander MacLachlan fared a little better. Despite almost losing his life in the events of 1922, he returned to the city in order to re-establish the American International College. However, he found his work hampered at every turn; in the hastily rebuilt city of Izmir, there was no place for foreign-run institutions. MacLachlan decided to quit in 1926. Just a few years later, the board of trustees voted to close down the college.

Hortense Wood was one of the few to remain in Bournabat in the weeks that followed the destruction of Smyrna. Although she remained stoic in the face of disaster, after a few months of loneliness her nerve broke. Bournabat remained deserted. The Levantines, Greeks and Armenians had all left and showed no signs of returning. Even her beloved cat, Topsy, had moved on to another world. Hortense found him dead in the garden, his head dashed to pieces with a rock. She vowed to remain in Bournabat, and would live there until her death in 1924, yet she felt terribly, desperately alone. ‘The gates of the houses [are] left wide open,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘The houses looted and deserted, the streets empty. The village abandoned by all former residents and our friends. Will they ever return!’

It was a pertinent question and one that many of the Levantines were asking themselves. The Whittalls, Girauds and Patersons – along with many of their former neighbours – were turning their thoughts to the future. It seemed inconceivable that they would not go back to the city that had been their virtual fiefdom for centuries, yet even the most bullish of Levantine patriarchs had to admit that the immediate future looked bleak indeed. Some had been taken to Cyprus, where they were eking out an existence of sorts in makeshift accommodation. Others had been shipped to Malta, where they were lodged in a disused military barracks at the Lazaretto. Among this latter batch was Herbert Octavius Whittall, along with many members of his extended family. They were accorded no respect by the British government in whose care they now found themselves. The barracks were damp and unsanitary, and the military rations virtually inedible. ‘The food is getting worse and worse,’ wrote Herbert Octavius. ‘Not fit for a dog.’

He, like all the other Levantine refugees in Malta, felt betrayed and abandoned by Britain. The Whittalls were proud of their British roots and throughout their long years in Turkey they had always viewed Britain as the mother country. Now, they discovered that the feeling was not reciprocated.

As Herbert Octavius reflected on his plight, it suddenly dawned on him that everything he cared about – everything that he had taken for granted – had been swept away. ‘I am,’ he admitted, ‘feeling very low.’ It was a moment of truth for a man who had never worn his emotions on his sleeve.

The extended Wood family – including Hortense’s elderly sisters – had fared somewhat better than the refugees in Malta. They had made their way to Cyprus, where they were living in a cheap hotel in Larnaca. ‘For the moment we will stay here,’ wrote Lucy de Cramer, Fernand’s mother. ‘It is a primitive place. Bad hotel. Food good enough. My head is confused. I write without clear ideas! My glasses I left at Smyrna! I can hardly see!’

She was surrounded by old friends from Bournabat but there were no servants to attend to her needs and the gaiety of their carefree social occasions was a thing of the past. ‘To live in a bedroom [and] make mutual visits . . . is not diverting.’ There was a growing feeling that the old way of life had disappeared for ever. The summer balls, the tea dances, the yachting and family picnics of just a few weeks previously already seemed to belong to another era.

Several of Lucy Wood’s oldest friends had already decided not to return to Bournabat. Even her sister, Louise, vowed not to go back, but when she was asked where she would live, she merely shrugged her shoulders. Smyrna was the only home she knew.

In the general upheaval and overwhelming human suffering, the fate of the Smyrniot Levantines seemed an irrelevance. They had not been raped or killed – that had been the fate of their servants. Nor had they had to face the horrors of the quayside. Yet most were ultimately to share the sufferings of exile. Everything they had striven to create had been destroyed: their magnificent homes, their profitable businesses and the city of Smyrna itself.

Few in Britain had any sympathy for a class of individuals who had lived privileged lives for centuries. Even fewer in Turkey mourned their loss. Indeed, many saw them as the authors of their own downfall. At the same time that soldiers had been marching to their deaths in central Anatolia, the Levantines of Smyrna had been busily preparing their annual spring balls. ‘We could not know how precarious was the basis of our ordered life,’ wrote one of Herbert Octavius’s great-nieces. ‘[It was] the end of the family as a tribal authority . . . the end of the family greatness [and] of their wealth, and everything they stood for.’

Most would never again set foot in Turkey. Herbert Octavius himself went to Tunis and retired from business. He never worked again. Other members of the Whittall dynasty went to America, Canada or colonial Central Africa. At least one of Magdalen’s great-grandsons managed to rediscover the family’s Midas touch. James Whittall headed to Rhodesia – now Zimbabwe – and turned 65,000 acres of semi-desert into rich dairy farmland. A 1966 article in the
Daily Express
gave James much of the credit. ‘It is the result of the tough pioneering spirit of the British race,’ it said. ‘Of the grit and intelligence of the Whittall family.’

Most of the Whittalls’ neighbours in Bournabat also headed to foreign climes. The Giraud family was among the little contingent that chose to return to Turkey and chance their luck in Ataturk’s modern republic. Almost nine decades after the catastrophe, Brian Giraud is still engaged in a legal battle to get compensation for the land and property that was confiscated by Ataturk’s new state.

As the Levantine refugees took stock of their situation, a tragedy of far greater magnitude was unfolding in Turkey. The catalyst was Mustafa Kemal’s march on the neutral zone around Constantinople, which was guarded by British troops. Kemal played his cards with skill, entering the zone with his army but declining to fight the British. At the same time, he negotiated a secret deal with the French – Britain’s half-hearted ally – that gave him much of what he wanted. This included eastern Thrace and the city of Constantinople.