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prof’s book highlights little-known hero of Armenian genocide
ishtartv.com-
bu.edu
By Joel Brown
6 May, 2015
Asa
Jennings was a failed small-town Methodist minister from upstate New York
working for the YMCA in Smyrna, Turkey, in 1922, when he saved a quarter of a
million Christians from perishing in a brutal final chapter of the Armenian
Genocide.
“A
private individual, a guy without portfolio, who held a minor position in the
YMCA, came forward and put together this astonishing rescue,” says Lou Ureneck,
who spent four years researching and writing Jennings’ story. “One of the
things I hope the book does is give America another hero. People ought to know
about the work of Asa Jennings.”
The
College of Communication journalism professor’s book, The Great Fire: One
American’s Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century’s First Genocide
(Ecco, 2015) will debut at an event this week in Washington, D.C., amid
commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the genocide’s beginning. The
story’s staying power can be seen today in the continuing controversy over use
of the word “genocide” and persecution of Christian minorities in other Muslim
countries in the Middle East.
Beginning
in 1915, the Ottoman government began the systematic elimination of its
Armenian minority, along with Greeks and other Christian minorities, in Turkey,
killing perhaps three million people and driving many more out of the country.
The book makes clear that the slaughter was a 10-year-long genocide of
Christians, beginning in 1912, and not the commonly described two-year Armenian
genocide of 1915 to 1917.
Smyrna,
known today as Izmir, had been a cosmopolitan port under Greek rule, where
Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Jews, and Europeans did business in relative peace.
But after Turkish armed forces defeated the Greeks in September 1922, they
began a religious cleansing, with executions and arrests sparking mob violence,
rape, and pillage.
In a
frantic effort to escape, hundreds of thousands of terrified Christians fled to
the quay along the harbor in hopes of finding safe passage. The Turks responded
by lighting the city on fire. “A half a million people, packed into a narrow
strip of pavement, maybe a mile and a half, two miles long, as a giant fire
comes at them, basically pushing them into the sea,” Ureneck says. “And many of
them did jump into the sea, either trying to swim to ships, or committing
suicide, or their clothes and packages had caught on fire.”
Jennings,
a short, mild-mannered fellow with back problems, had managed to get his family
on a ship out with other Americans, but he stayed behind in an effort to help
several thousand refugees in safe houses along the quay. Horrified by what he
saw, he first bribed an Italian ship captain to spirit away the people from the
safe houses. Then he hatched an even bigger plan, securing a flotilla of empty
Greek merchant ships to save thousands more.
American
sailors watching the slaughter on the quay were moved to intervene where they
could, plucking drowning refugees from the water and stopping individual acts
of violence. But beyond protecting its own citizens, the US government, with
growing commercial ties to Turkey, was unwilling to get involved, especially so
soon after a costly war. America’s top officer in the region, Admiral Mark
Bristol, played tennis outside Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) as Smyrna
burned.
But
the Navy’s man on the scene in Smyrna, Lt. Commander Halsey Powell, moved to
help Jennings execute the evacuation even though it contravened his orders.
Much of it was done quietly, behind the scenes, but at one crucial moment,
Powell aimed his ship’s big guns at the Turkish Army. The gesture alone was
enough to “transform the situation,” Ureneck says.
The
author of Backcast:
Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey through the Heart of Alaska and
Cabin:
Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine, Ureneck had a long,
much-honored career as a newspaper editor (Portland Press Herald, Maine Sunday
Telegram, and Philadelphia Inquirer) before joining the University. He first
read a brief mention of Jennings in a book about Smyrna perhaps 30 years ago.
“I
wondered, who is this man,” he says. “He saved a lot of lives, and it struck me
as one of the great untold stories of American history.”
He
held onto the idea, and four years ago began research in earnest, visiting
libraries and archives in Washington, London, and numerous other cities. Some
of his best sources were US Naval reports from officers on the scene. He toured
some of Jennings’ churches in New York, where the pastor was little, if at all,
remembered, and met with Jennings’ grandson and studied his diaries. He also
visited many of the locations in the book on four trips to Turkey.
“I
had been reading about this horrible event for a long time, and finally I found
myself there,” Ureneck says. “Now, the modern city of Izmir is a concrete and
glass metropolis. The old Smyrna was destroyed and a modern city grew up in its
place. But still, it’s easy to imagine. The Point is still there, the place
where the Turkish machine guns kept refugees from escaping is still there, the
pier is still there…there are these artifacts that will remind one of the old
story. There was so much suffering.”
Jennings
was in fact recognized for a brief period after the burning of Smyrna, but his
story and that of the genocide fell victim to a State Department campaign to
protect the diplomatic and commercial relationship with a reascendant Turkey.
Ureneck
found that many in Turkey cling to a different version of events, often blaming
Armenians for starting the fire.
“What
I found is, those years are a black hole in Turkish history for the Turkish
people,” he says. “The history as it’s taught in Turkey is shaped by the
ideology.”
In
general, “the people of Izmir know there was a fire, and they know that Greeks
and Armenians used to live there, and they know that there was a population
exchange. But they don’t know much else about what happened,” Ureneck says.
“People had lots of questions for me about what did I know and where did I
learn it?…I think more and more there is an educated class in Turkey that wants
to know.”
He
says that Armenian attempts to bring the story to the fore—as well as the
Pope’s recent statement calling it a genocide—have shifted people’s understanding.
“I
think the world has awakened to what happened in Asia Minor during those
years,” Ureneck says. “When will Turkey stop denying it? I have no idea. But
clearly there are a lot of people in Turkey who would like to know the truth,
who are willing to admit the truth, who want to know the facts. So I think
eventually Turkey will reconcile itself to its history. But it’s not an easy
thing for any country to do, to admit it participated in a genocide.”
Lou
Ureneck will read from The Great Fire at the Harvard Book Store, 1256
Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge, on Tuesday, May 19, at 7 p.m.
and at Brookline Booksmith later in the summer.
Burning
Of Smyrna 1922:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEjFElvQD0U
