Collections
Six hundred and fifty children remain at Antoura. c. 1919–1920.
Location
Antoura, Lebanon
Year
1919–1920
Item Detail
The orphanage at Antoura was Djemal Pasha's, set up in a French monastery school that the Ottoman forces had taken over. Two thousand Armenian children were taken there during the war and made Turkish: renamed and punished for speaking Armenian. Six hundred and fifty were still there when American relief workers took the institution over, Armenians and Kurds together. They line up in double file across the courtyard of the long arcaded building. Bertha Belle Morley ran it for the American Red Cross. She had taught at Merzifon since 1913 and kept a daily journal of the deportations she watched from there, and she found the Antoura children without warm clothing, stockings, or shoes.
Context
Silas Hertzler (1888–1975) served in Syria from January 1919 to March 1920, first under the American Red Cross and, from 1 April 1919, under the American Committee for Relief in the Near East. He was one of seven young volunteers the Mennonite Relief Commission for War Sufferers sent on the relief ship Pensacola on 25 January 1919. After a few months in the Beirut transport department, he went to the Sidon district, where William Stoltzfus directed the work, and Hertzler was responsible for three hundred boys in the orphanage. Many of the children had been orphaned by the Armenian Genocide or by the wartime famine in Mount Lebanon. He taught at Goshen College from 1920 to 1958.
The collection draws on his loose prints and relief photograph album at Goshen College Archives. It records the Sidon orphanage and its trade shops, the Armenian refugee barracks at Aleppo, the Syrian Orphanage at Jerusalem, and the Antoura orphanage, where Ottoman authorities had tried to make Armenian children Turkish. Three portraits follow one girl, Miriam Moosa, from her arrival to six months later. Some prints show places he is not known to have worked, among them Konia and Smyrna.
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Holding Institution
Goshen College Archives, Goshen College. Goshen, Indiana.
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External Link
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Attribution
Silas and Anna Weaver Hertzler Papers. Middle East Photographs, 1919–20. HM1/197, Box 19–20. Goshen College Archives, Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana.
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Rights
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Notes
Original caption: "Antoura orphanage. 650 Armenians, and Kurds."
HM1/197, Box 20.
The figure is confirmed twice over. James H. Nicol's 1918 report, quoted in James L. Barton, Story of Near East Relief (1930), reports "the Armenian orphanage at Antoura, where the 650 children remain of the 2,000 whom the Turks tried to Turkify." News Bulletin (American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief), vol. III no. 10, March 1919, introduces "Miss Bertha Morley, who was recently put in charge of the Antura Orphanage, Beirut, a Turkish orphanage containing 650 children," and quotes her: "They were being made into Moslems as rapidly as possible. In the early days they were punished severely for speaking in the Armenian language. When the Turks left the children remained in a sorry plight indeed. They are the most pathetic little creatures I ever saw, just skin and bones. I find the needs of this orphanage staggering. Most of the children are without warm clothing, stockings, shoes."
Bertha Belle Morley (1878-1973), of Mentor, Ohio, served under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. She taught music, geometry, and history at the Anatolia Girls' School at Merzifon from 1913 to 1916 and kept a daily journal of the first phase of the Armenian Genocide as she watched it there, published as Marsovan 1915: The Diaries of Bertha B. Morley, edited by Hilmar Kaiser (Princeton: Gomidas Institute, 2000).
Morley served with the American Red Cross, not with Near East Relief. Her American Board memorial record puts it plainly: she was at Merzifon from 1912 to 1921 "except for the year 1918-19 when she went with the American Red Cross to Palestine to do refugee work. For nine months of that year she was reassigned to Antoura, Syria (now Lebanon) as principal of an orphanage of 630 children, most of them Armenian. She adopted eleven of the children and in July 1919 took them all to Merzifon with her." (American Board memorial record for Bertha B. Morley, MFM-M-66, American Research Institute in Turkey, Istanbul, in the Digital Library for International Research, item 17292.) The 630 there is the memorial record's figure, against the 650 that Near East Relief published in March 1919 and that Hertzler's own caption gives.
The Red Cross gave up its administrative responsibilities in Palestine and Syria to Near East Relief under an agreement drawn up at Konia in March 1919. James L. Barton, Story of Near East Relief (1930), p. 78: the Red Cross "turned over its administrative responsibilities as of April 1st, permitting the personnel to remain in the service of the Near East Relief if they chose." Morley did not stay. On p. 114, the same book dates the transfer to 1 March instead, and the two passages are not reconciled.
Antoura did not last as a station. The children were moved to Ghazir when the French owners of the property returned, and by February 1921 they were there under Mr. and Mrs. Moultrie of Near East Relief. (Ernest W. Riggs, "The Orphans of Syria," Near East Relief [newsletter], vol. III no. 5, 4 February 1921, p. 1.) Antoura is not named in Near East Relief's appropriation for Syria of January 1920, in which Ghazir Orphanages draws 1,000 Egyptian pounds.
Karnig Panian, Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press, 2015), is a survivor's account by one of the boys held here. It describes the institution: Djemal Pasha's project, at least partly administered by Halide Edib Adivar, in the buildings of the College Saint Joseph. At the armistice, the Turkish staff left, and the children were unsupervised. French and Armenian soldiers reached them first. Panian gives the abandoned population as nearly 1,000 Armenian and 400 Kurdish children, which does not reconcile with the 630 and 650 above and need not, the counts being from different moments. What it corroborates is the album card's "Armenians and Kurds."