A Mennonite relief worker’s account of the children at NER’s Beirut headquarters and the orphanages along the Lebanese coast, drawn from letters and photos she sent home between 1921 and 1923.
Dispatches
“To Be Thrown Out Into the World”: The Nellie Miller Mann Collection
Nellie’s Mission
Nellie Miller was twenty-four when she sailed for Beirut in 1921 — newly engaged to Cleo Mann, and one of only two Mennonite women sent to the Near East by the Mennonite Relief Commission between 1919 and 1923. Over the next two years she would keep the books at Near East Relief’s regional headquarters and, in the off-hours of a desk job, photograph what she saw at the refugee camps in Beirut and at the orphanages along the coast where children who had survived the genocide were beginning their lives over.
Miller had grown up in Elkhart, Indiana, in a devout Mennonite family active in the Prairie Street Mennonite Church. She first learned of the humanitarian crisis in the Near East at Goshen College and joined the Mennonite Relief Commission shortly after.
Nellie Miller, c. 1921, around the time she sailed for Beirut for her two-year NER service.
What Nellie Saw in Beirut
Miller’s letters describe a city under pressure. The NER regional headquarters handled cash, supplies, and personnel for the entire Levant; her desk job kept her in the Beirut office, but the refugee tents pressed against the streets she walked each day. She visited the camps when she could and photographed what she saw — women sewing donated cloth, boys carrying away flour, families living under canvas in the open. Her individual portraits carry the names she gave them at the time: Refugee Boy with Bundles, Happy in Spite of Dirt, The Crippled Water Carrier.
Armenian refugees living in tents on the outskirts of Beirut, one of the camps Miller visited and photographed, c. 1921–1923.
Women sewing at an Armenian refugee camp in Beirut, photographed by Miller during her NER service, c. 1921–1923.
"Happy in Spite of Dirt" — Miller's title for this portrait of an Armenian refugee child in Beirut, c. 1921–1923.
Water carrier, Armenian Camp"The Crippled Water Carrier" — Miller's title for this portrait at the Armenian refugee camp in Beirut, c. 1921–1923.
"Refugee Boy with Bundles" — Miller's title for this portrait at an Armenian refugee camp in Beirut, c. 1921–1923.
The Transfer to the Coast
Miller’s letters track the larger operation NER was running through Beirut. In December 1921, French forces evacuated Cilicia, and thousands of Armenians who had stayed behind began arriving on the Lebanese coast. “For the last week or two, the Armenians have been coming into Beirut by the hundreds,” she wrote on Christmas Day. Constantinople, Alexandretta, and the northern coastal cities had closed to refugees; Beirut was the only port still open.
The next summer brought the largest movement of the entire NER operation. With permission from the Turkish Nationalist government in Angora, NER moved its orphans down from the interior — from Marash, Aintab, Urfa, Mardin, Diarbekir, and Harpoot. By August 1922, the Harpoot children were arriving in Beirut at a rate of 150 a day. NER housed them at Antilyas, a large silk mill just north of the city, rented rent-free. Chartered steamers sent down from Constantinople ferried them onward, 2,000 at a time, to NER orphanages along the Syrian and Lebanese coast at Jubeil, Ghazir, Antoura, and Sidon, and to receiving facilities in Greece and Egypt. Nearly thirty thousand orphans moved through this system in 1922 and 1923. Miller’s photographs are a domestic record of one stop along it: boys hauling flour sacks, long outdoor tables set for meals, children eating in the open air.
Orphans from Aintab being prepared for transfer to Ghazir, one of the coastal NER orphanages that absorbed children evacuated from the Turkish interior, c. 1922.
Orphans being taken by lighter from the Beirut harbor to a chartered steamer for transfer to another NER orphanage along the coast, c. 1922.
Orphan boys unload sacks of relief flour from a lorry at the Antilyas orphanage, north of Beirut, c. 1921–1923.
Boys take an open-air meal amid tents at the Antilyas Orphanage, c. 1921–1923, where Nellie Miller Mann found "about 1,800 children."
Children at prayer before dinner on the terrace of the Birds' Nest Orphanage in Sidon, ca. 1923.
“Miss Nellie” and the Birds’ Nest
Miller’s letters home — to Cleo and to her family in Indiana — document daily life in the Beirut office and the increasingly desperate refugee situation around it. She also visited the orphanages along the coast, and at one of them she became a fixture.
The Birds’ Nest, in Sidon, was a Danish-run orphanage housed in a former Druze palace by the sea. Some four hundred of the youngest children in the NER orphanage system lived there under the care of Maria Jacobsen, the Danish relief worker the children called mairik — “little mother” in Armenian, rendered in English correspondence as Mama. The affectionate “Miss Nellie” was a favorite with the children, and her photographs capture the texture of childhood in that household: playtime, quiet moments, the children’s affection for one another and for Jacobsen.
Maria Jacobsen (right) unpacking supplies sent from Denmark at the Birds' Nest Orphanage in Sidon, c. 1922.
Birds' Nest children with kiddie cars built for them by older orphan boys at NER's Maameltein industrial workshop, c. 1922.
I am learning to see things from another viewpoint. In short, it is the best thing in the world that could ever have happened to me, to be thrown out into the world, away from everyone who cares, and made to face life alone a little while.
From the Mann letters, c. 1921–1923.
Sharing Nellie’s Story
Miller considered extending her time with Near East Relief but returned home as scheduled in 1923. She and Cleo were married in August 1924. She kept her letters from the field for the rest of her life.
Nellie Miller Mann died in Goshen, Indiana, in 1997, at the age of ninety-nine. In 2013, her son David Mann published her writings and photographs in Letters from Syria, 1921–1923: A Response to the Armenian Tragedy. The original collection came to the Near East Foundation and from there to the NERHS digital archive, where it now anchors much of what the public record can show of NER’s work in Beirut, Sidon, and the orphanages along the Lebanese coast in the early 1920s.
Exterior of the Birds' Nest Orphanage at Sidon, c. 1921–1923 — Nellie Miller Mann noted it was "once the home of a very wealthy pasha."
Armenian orphans at Antilyas on the Lebanese coast, where Near East Relief sheltered children evacuated from Anatolia, c. 1922.
Explore the Collection
More than 100 photographs from Miller’s two years with Near East Relief — the Birds’ Nest at Sidon, the refugee camps of Beirut, the orphanages along the Lebanese coast.
Nellie Miller (left) in the Near East Relief regional office in Beirut, where she served as secretary to the treasurer, c. 1922.
Read the Letters
Miller’s letters home to Cleo Mann and her family, published by her son David Mann in 2013. Daily life in the Beirut office, visits to the Birds’ Nest, and the desperate refugee situation as she described it at the time.