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"That's How It Was" - Narrated by a Witness of the Armenian Genocide

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  • "That's How It Was" - Narrated by a Witness of the Armenian Genocide

    "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



    Photo by
    חדשות מעודכנות לקהל דתי והחרדי. מאמרי סיקור וכתבות צבע בכל מה שקשור לדת, רבנים, זכויות ועוד. היכנסו וקראו


    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
    What if I find someone else when looking for you? My soul shivers as the idea invades my mind.
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