NER Relief Workers

Near East Relief ran on the Americans it sent abroad — orphanage directors, doctors, nurses, teachers, agricultural instructors, mechanics, drivers — and on colleagues from Britain, Denmark, Norway, France, and elsewhere who joined the work in the field. They were prolific writers. Letters home, daily journals, official reports to New York, dispatches for NER’s own magazines: between them they left a vast first-hand record of what the work demanded.

These are those accounts. They were written for very different readers — family, superiors, the reading public — but all of them show the work close up: conditions in the orphanages and refugee camps, the bargaining with local authorities, the losses and the rescues, the decisions that settled whether children reached safety.

Each item links to the full archival record.