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Uh’ville nurse witnessed Armenian tragedy
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By Jon Baker
The Times-Reporter, Dover New-Philidelphia Ohio
Posted Jun 01, 2008 @ 11:42 PM
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While working as a Red Cross nurse in Armenia just after World War I, Blanche Knox of Uhrichsville saw things no person should ever have to see.
Knox, an 1889 graduate of Uhrichsville High, arrived in the country in April 1919 at a time when the Armenian people were starving.
“Truly this is the place that God forgot,” she wrote to a relative in Uhrichsville from the city of Alexandropol. “You cannot imagine the awfulness of the scenes in this town.
People dying on the streets of starvation, almost naked, homeless and starving.”
Knox was working for the American Committee for the Relief of the Near East. The agency funneled millions of dollars of food into Armenia to aid a people left utterly destitute by years of war and the chaos brought on by the collapse of the Russian Empire, of which Armenia was a part.
Christian Armenia enjoyed a brief period of independence while Knox was working there, but it was at war with many of its Muslim neighbors.
“In one refugee building yesterday one man cried out: ‘Give us bread or kill us,’” Knox wrote in a letter that later was published in the Uhrichsville Evening Chronicle. “One family were eating dog meat – they ate like wolves.”
She continued, “I saw boys of 5 and 6 ... grubbing in the short grass of the cemetery on the hill for the roots of grass to eat.”
Desperation drove some people to cannibalism, Knox wrote.
Knox was assigned to help operate four orphanages in the town of Igdir. She arrived there on Good Friday, April 18.
“The streets and market place swarmed with starving, ragged, vermin-infested human creatures,” she wrote.
She wrote in June of the death of one of her Red Cross co-workers, Edith Winchester, who died of typhus after being bitten by an infected body louse.
Knox also was bitten but didn’t contract the disease.
As American food aid reached the Armenian people, the situation improved dramatically, and Knox was able to appreciate the beauty of Igdir, located in the vicinity of “majestic, snow-crowned” Mount Ararat.
Things got worse again in late summer.
The Kurds, enemies of the Armenians, surrounded the town on three sides. Knox began making plans to evacuate the 836 orphans in her care in case Igdir was attacked. But the evacuation was repeatedly delayed. “Since Saturday we have been ready to leave, but have been begged by the commandant of the forces here to wait two days, then just one day, for our taking the orphans out would reveal the weakness of our army and the Kurds would at once attack the town,” Knox wrote on Aug. 19.
“I never have been afraid,” she continued. “We Americans are in no danger, but of course the Armenian orphans are if the Kurds get in here.”
The Kurds finally attacked on Sept. 11.
“I joined the long train of refugees on the Erivan road about 6 a.m. Sept. 12th perched high on a cart – a small two-wheeled cart – with six children,” Knox wrote.
Knox then went to work in the orphanages and refugee hospitals in the city of Etchmiadzen.
“Our hospitals and orphanages are crowded,” she wrote. “We are bathing and clothing the refugees as fast as we can.”
One day in January 1920, Knox and another Red Cross nurse were informed that some men had broken into their agency’s central store house.
The two women, armed with guns, went to investigate.
“We found the store house full of men, carrying out sacks of flour,” she wrote back home.
The men, from a village on the plains outside of Etchmiadzen, were loading the flour onto ox carts.
Knox ordered them to stop what they were doing and to leave, using the Armenian word for hurry, “heide.”
“I pointed my small pistol at them – a gun in the hands of a woman, you know – and they all ‘heided,’” she later wrote.
She was relieved when soldiers arrived. “If the men had tried to resist, it would have gone hard with us,” she wrote.
Knox finished her work in June and then returned to the U.S. by way of Rome.
She later worked in the Germantown Hospital at Philadelphia, where she taught nursing.
Jon Baker is editorial page editor of The Times-Reporter. Baker can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Jon Baker
The Times-Reporter, Dover New-Philidelphia Ohio
Posted Jun 01, 2008 @ 11:42 PM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
While working as a Red Cross nurse in Armenia just after World War I, Blanche Knox of Uhrichsville saw things no person should ever have to see.
Knox, an 1889 graduate of Uhrichsville High, arrived in the country in April 1919 at a time when the Armenian people were starving.
“Truly this is the place that God forgot,” she wrote to a relative in Uhrichsville from the city of Alexandropol. “You cannot imagine the awfulness of the scenes in this town.
People dying on the streets of starvation, almost naked, homeless and starving.”
Knox was working for the American Committee for the Relief of the Near East. The agency funneled millions of dollars of food into Armenia to aid a people left utterly destitute by years of war and the chaos brought on by the collapse of the Russian Empire, of which Armenia was a part.
Christian Armenia enjoyed a brief period of independence while Knox was working there, but it was at war with many of its Muslim neighbors.
“In one refugee building yesterday one man cried out: ‘Give us bread or kill us,’” Knox wrote in a letter that later was published in the Uhrichsville Evening Chronicle. “One family were eating dog meat – they ate like wolves.”
She continued, “I saw boys of 5 and 6 ... grubbing in the short grass of the cemetery on the hill for the roots of grass to eat.”
Desperation drove some people to cannibalism, Knox wrote.
Knox was assigned to help operate four orphanages in the town of Igdir. She arrived there on Good Friday, April 18.
“The streets and market place swarmed with starving, ragged, vermin-infested human creatures,” she wrote.
She wrote in June of the death of one of her Red Cross co-workers, Edith Winchester, who died of typhus after being bitten by an infected body louse.
Knox also was bitten but didn’t contract the disease.
As American food aid reached the Armenian people, the situation improved dramatically, and Knox was able to appreciate the beauty of Igdir, located in the vicinity of “majestic, snow-crowned” Mount Ararat.
Things got worse again in late summer.
The Kurds, enemies of the Armenians, surrounded the town on three sides. Knox began making plans to evacuate the 836 orphans in her care in case Igdir was attacked. But the evacuation was repeatedly delayed. “Since Saturday we have been ready to leave, but have been begged by the commandant of the forces here to wait two days, then just one day, for our taking the orphans out would reveal the weakness of our army and the Kurds would at once attack the town,” Knox wrote on Aug. 19.
“I never have been afraid,” she continued. “We Americans are in no danger, but of course the Armenian orphans are if the Kurds get in here.”
The Kurds finally attacked on Sept. 11.
“I joined the long train of refugees on the Erivan road about 6 a.m. Sept. 12th perched high on a cart – a small two-wheeled cart – with six children,” Knox wrote.
Knox then went to work in the orphanages and refugee hospitals in the city of Etchmiadzen.
“Our hospitals and orphanages are crowded,” she wrote. “We are bathing and clothing the refugees as fast as we can.”
One day in January 1920, Knox and another Red Cross nurse were informed that some men had broken into their agency’s central store house.
The two women, armed with guns, went to investigate.
“We found the store house full of men, carrying out sacks of flour,” she wrote back home.
The men, from a village on the plains outside of Etchmiadzen, were loading the flour onto ox carts.
Knox ordered them to stop what they were doing and to leave, using the Armenian word for hurry, “heide.”
“I pointed my small pistol at them – a gun in the hands of a woman, you know – and they all ‘heided,’” she later wrote.
She was relieved when soldiers arrived. “If the men had tried to resist, it would have gone hard with us,” she wrote.
Knox finished her work in June and then returned to the U.S. by way of Rome.
She later worked in the Germantown Hospital at Philadelphia, where she taught nursing.
Jon Baker is editorial page editor of The Times-Reporter. Baker can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].