Chris L. Graber Diaries (1919–1920)

Christian L. “Chris” Graber (1895–1987) was a Mennonite from Noble, Iowa, who spent the war as a conscientious objector at Fort Riley, Kansas. Discharged on January 3, 1919, he sailed from New York three weeks later on the relief ship Pensacola with the first group of Mennonite volunteers sent to work with the American Committee for Relief in the Near East. He first worked on motor transport in Beirut. In May he went to Aleppo, where he ran the relief industries and, from July, the old army barracks that sheltered thousands of Armenian refugees. At the end of 1919, he was sent to open relief work in the Antioch district. He later spent many years as business manager of Goshen College.

The collection holds his 1919 diary, with an entry for every day of the year; his January and February 1920 diary; and a letter he wrote from Aleppo in June 1919 for the Wayland News. Graber was a mechanic and supply man, not a doctor or a missionary, and he wrote about the work in plain detail: assembling trucks and wiring a hospital at Beirut, the 700 refugee men, women and girls who spun, knitted, wove and sewed in the Aleppo shops for about 5 piasters a day, trials and weddings at the barracks, and the night he went up to the jail alone and “bluffed the whole gang” that meant to rush it.

The 1920 diary follows him into the villages around Antioch and Suadia (Samandag), where he checked padded relief lists house by house and paid out relief family by family. Six of the villages on his list were the Armenian villages of Musa Dagh, whose people had held out on the mountain against deportation in 1915 until French warships carried them to Port Said. He found them in better shape than the poor of Antioch, because “the people here all fought the Turks and instead of being deported were taken by French battleships to Egypt.”

The originals are held in the Christian L. and Mina Roth Graber Papers (HM1/209), Goshen College Archives, Goshen, Indiana.

Sources: Graber’s own diaries and letter. Orie O. Miller’s account of the Mennonite workers in J. S. Hartzler, Mennonites in the World War (1921), gives his postings at Beirut, Aleppo and Antioch, and the Goshen College Archives finding aid for HM1/209 gives his life dates and later career. Additional sources are cited in the individual records.