The League of Nations' Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927

Extract

Housed in the League of Nations archive at Geneva is a collection of intake surveys from the Rescue Home in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. These documents record the histories of some 2,000 Armenian girls, boys, and young women who were rescued—or, more often, rescued themselves—from Arab, Kurdish, and Turkish households into which they had been taken during and after the First World War and as a consequence of the Armenian Genocide of 1915.1 The story of Zabel is representative of the histories in the home's records.2 The daughter of Bedros, Zabel arrived at the home on May 18, 1926, at the age of eighteen. Having been deported along with her family when she was seven or eight, she recalled that she was from Arapgir, a town in Southeastern Anatolia. She told the director of the home, Karen Jeppe, enough that the following information could be reconstructed:

In the beginning of the deportation, Zabel's father was separated from her family and was sent in an unknown direction. Zabel was exiled with her mother, 5 sisters and a younger brother. The caravan which consisted of men, women, boys, girls and infants, was formed to go on foot 3 months, wandering upon the mountains, passing through the villages, crossing the rivers and marching across the deserts … The gendarmes had received the order to kill the unfortunate people by every means in their power. Near Veranshehir, they collected all the beautiful girls, and distributed them among the Turks and the Kurds. The rest of the caravan had to go further on in the deserts to die. Zabel had been the share of a Kurd, who married her. She lived there 11 years, unwillingly, til an Armenian chauffeur informed her that many of her relatives still were living in Aleppo. Having made her escape in safety, she reached Ras al-Ain, from where by our agent she was sent to us.3

A notation on the next page explains that Zabel was later placed with relatives. The other histories echo her story with unremitting consistency: the children and young people arriving in Aleppo told of deportations, separations, mass extrajudicial killings, and repeated rapes, followed by years of unpaid servitude as agricultural workers or domestic servants, servile concubines, unconsenting wives, and involuntary mothers.4