"That’s How It Was"
Narrated by Eitan Belkind, member of the NILI
Published by the Ministry of Defense of Israel, 1979, pages 77-78,
115-116, 118-120, 124, 127
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Eitan Belkind (1887 ` 1979) was born in Rishon LeZion and graduated
from Turkish military high school. During WWI he participated in a team
fighting locust invasions. Together with a few other outraged witnesses
of the Armenian massacres, he founded NILI, an organization, which
collaborated with the British against the Turks.
¦The majority of the Jews in Israel, the Old Yishuv and the newcomers
alike, kept their non-Turkish passports in order to be protected by the
Capitulations of the Ottoman Empire. The Capitulations were privileges
granted to European citizens resident in Turkey in exchange for
assistance given by the European nations to the disintegrating Empire.
During the war the Turkish military powers could not agree with the
fact, that dozens of thousands people from hostile countries having
foreign citizenship lived in Israel (the newcomers were mainly from the
Russian Empire fighting against the Turks). The Turks demanded that the
Jews either acquire the Ottoman citizenship or leave Israel. Bilium
(the first settlers in Palestine coming from Russia) and other founders
of the first Aliyah led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, made a public appeal to
the Jews, encouraging them to adopt Ottoman citizenship. However, very
few people responded, as most Jews were afraid that once they would get
Turkish passports, they would be drafted to the Turkish Army, something
the Jews greatly feared. Many Jews preferred to be exiled from Israel
to serve in the Turkish Army.
On Friday in late March 1915, about 10000 Jewish were exiled from
Israel. They were taken to Jaffa and forced to board ships belonging to
neutral states such as Italy, USA, etc. The deportation was carried out
with great cruelty. The deportees left all their property behind, women
and children were hurled into the ships. It was a tragic and oppressing
sight.
Avshalam Feinberg, who witnessed the deportations, went to Jerusalem to
the Anti-Locust Department, and encouraged Aharon Aharonson to start an
uprising; because the Jewish settlements were on the brink of
annihilation. Avshalom insisted that, in his opinion, that it had been
the Germans that advised Turkey to deport the Jews.
…’We must help the English and the French to win the war, -said
Avshalom, – otherwise if the Germans win, God forbid, our country will
become a German colony as part of Germany’s slogan Drang nach Osten
plan. Germany has no settlements, with a population of over 85 million;
it is looking for new lands. Israel is one of its targets the Germans
had already started to populate it, masquerading as the Knights
Templar’.
THE EXTERMINATION OF THE ARMENIANS
… On the second day of our journey, we saw a corpse flowing in the
Euphrates. We were surprised but the soldier accompanying us reassured
us that this was a body of an Armenian. We found out that there was a
camp nearby, on the other side of the Euphrates where Armenians
deported from Armenia were being held. Our friend Shirinyan turned
white and asked us to cross the Euphrates and go to the Armenian camp.
We found several hundred people in the camp living in small handmade
huts. The territory was clean; the huts were built on one line. We
passed by huts and looked inside. We saw women and children. In one of
the huts, Shirinyan found one of his aunts, who told that all men had
been killed; only women and children remained.
Shirinyan had no idea what had happened to his nation. Shocked, he
began to cry on his aunt’s shoulder, but Jacob Baker and I tried to
cheer him up and said that we still had our duty to do. We went on; the
further we traveled the more floating corpses of Armenians we saw.
After six days, we reached Der-el-Zor, an important city of the region.
We paid a visit to the military Commandant of the city, the Circassian
Colonel Ahmab Bey. We presented our papers and explained the purpose of
our journey. My friend Jacob Baker was given an accommodation, but I
and my friend Shirinyan were arrested. Later Jacob Baker visited us and
said that we were detained for being Armenians. It turned out the
Commandant believed I was also Armenian my first name Eitan, was
written in Turkish [which then used Arabic characters ` Translator’s
note] with the sound `i’ was presented by two dots subscript, the
character `t’ was written with two dots superscript, so the Commander
read my name as Etian, which sounded perfectly Armenian.
`No matter how much I tried to explain things to the Commandant,-said
Baker,-I could not persuade him. I have sent a telegram to the chief in
Damascus’. I was kept in custody for two days until a telegram with
order to release me. I do not know what happened to our friend
Shirinyan. Der-el-Zor, was a military centre, so it had a military
hospital lead by a Jewish doctor Bhor (?) and a Jewish pharmacist
called Arto. There we found out that Ahmad Bey, was the commander of
Circassian troops mobilized for exterminating the Jews. The doctor and
the pharmacist invited us to their roomy house, told us that all
Armenian men had been killed on the way from their homes in Anatolia,
and beautiful women and girls were left to the mercy of Bedouins.
As soon as we found horses to ride and soldiers to accompany us, Jacob
Baker went on his way to Mosul, I set out to my region, along the river
Kibur (?). At night before departure we heard terrible, heart-rending
female screams. The Armenian camp was one kilometer away from our
house. The screaming continued all night. We asked what was happening,
they told us that children were being taken from their mothers to live
in dormitories and continue their education. However in the morning
when we set off and crossed the bridge across Euphrates, I was shocked
to see the river red with blood and beheaded corpses of children
floating on the water. The scene was horrible, as there was nothing we
could do.
After three days riding, I reached Aram- Naharaim where I witnessed a
terrible tragedy. There were two camps next to each other, one Armenian
and one Circassian. The Circassians were `busy’ with exterminating the
Armenians. There were also Arab sheikhs, who selected beautiful
Armenian girls as their wives. Two women approached me and gave their
photos to me. Should I ever get to Aleppo and find their families
(whether their families were alive, was a question), the women asked me
to send their greetings to whomever I find there.
The Circassian officer seeing me talk to the two Armenian women ordered
me to leave but I stayed to see what would happen to the Armenians. The
Circassian soldiers ordered the Armenians to gather dry grass and pile
it into a tall pyramid, then they tied up all the Armenians who were
there, almost 5000 souls, their hands tied together and put them in a
circle around the pile of grass and set it afire in a blaze, which rose
up to the heaven together with the screams of the wretched people, who
were being burned to death. I fled from the place I could not stand
this horrifying sight. I rode as fast as I could, wishing to get as far
from the place as possible. After two hours of crazy gallop I could
still hear creams of the poor victims until they died out. In two days
I returned to that place and saw the burned bodies of thousands people.
I approached the Sandjer Mountains where Yezidim lived. At the foot of
the mountain, on my way to the city Urfa in the north, I witnessed
several mass-exterminations of the Armenians. People were wretched,
desperate to madness. In one of the houses I saw an Armenian woman
cooking her own child’s body in a pot. All the roads were strewn with
the corpses of murdered Armenians.
A JEWISH WOMAN IN A SHEIKH’S TENT
…I went to the sheikh’s tent and was very happy to find my friend
Jacob Baker.
At midnight after the meal was over, the sheikh went to his tent and we
stayed back. There was a little boy watching over the fire. Jacob Baker
and I spoke French. I told him about thee things that happened to me in
Urfa and about Armenian pogroms that I saw on my way and he told me
about his work in Mosul. We sat talking late in the night, when
suddenly the child whom we mistook for a Bedouin told us in French that
he and his mother are Armenians and the chief of the tribe had saved
them from extermination. His mother became the sheikh’s wife and he
helped welcoming guests. The child went on and told us that the chief
of the other tribe had a Jewish wife taken from the family of the city
Caesarea in Anatolia. Her husband had been killed and the sheikh took
her.
We were shocked upon hearing this and asked the boy whether we could
meet the woman. In spite of the danger the child got into the tent
where the Jewess was. Everyone in the tent was asleep and the woman
managed to get unnoticed. She was 25 and very beautiful. She told us
her surname was Biram, a typical Turkish name. Her family lived in the
Armenian quarter of the city and when they were taking the Armenians,
they also took this woman with her husband and child despite all their
protests. Her husband and child had been killed but she was rescued by
the Arab sheikh who took her as his wife. We promised to take care of
her.
…Two weeks later I turned towards the Euphrates and hurried back to
Der-el-Zor. In the post I found a letter from Haim Khanum in
Constantinople (the main city of Turkey), who asked me not to interfere
in the case of Mrs. Biram, as she had connections with the killings of
the Armenians that was a military secret. Besides I sent a letter to my
niece Tsilya, who was a student in Berlin, in answer to my letter sent
by German military mail, where I described everything that had happened
to the Armenians. I got my letter back with a request never to write to
her about such things again, to beware of the German military mail,
because my letters might get opened by censors.
In Der-el-Zor I stayed with the pharmacist Arto, who now had five
Armenian wives whom he married so as to save their lives. He told me
that about 30 Armenian women were working in the military hospital this
had been Doctor Bhor’s way of rescuing them.
I must mention that all the time I was in Aram Naharaim, I was unable
to eat the splendid fish from the Euphrates, which I liked very much,
remembering that those fishes had fed off the corpses of murdered
Armenians, including young children. I was also unable to have sexual
relationship with the Armenian girls who were offered me by Doctor Bhor
and pharmacist Arto.
While still in Damascus… I gave my records about the Armenian
massacres to Josef Lishansky.
When we returned testing station I stayed with Sara. She told me that
my records of Armenian massacres, which she had sent to Egypt [to the
British-J.S.], had made a great impression.
…In my trips in the south of Syria and Iraq I saw with my own eyes
the extermination of the Armenian nation, I watched the atrocious
murders, and saw children’s heads cut off and watched the burning of
innocent people whose only wrongdoing was to be Armenian. I also
suffered horrible torments in prison; and my dear brother Neiman and
his friend Josef were killed. And yet despite all this, I will not feel
true to myself unless I write down what I carry in my heart. I pitied
the Turks, who fell so mean at the end of their power in the East
because of collaborating with the Germans. On the advice of the Germans
the Turks perpetrated brutal massacres of the Armenians with the hands
of the Circassian Muslims fanatics.
© Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
