Testimony: Lex W. Kluttz (1894-1950)
Lex William Kluttz (1894-1950)
(Courtesy of Anne Kluttz Alexander)
Thracian refugees are already beginning to arrive in Salonika. The poorer peasants are filtering in afoot, plodding along the roads beside their donkeys, heaped high with pitiful possessions of household goods. The more prosperous Thracians have sold everything they possessed, and are arriving in autos heaped high with trunks and baggage. Seventy thousand refugees from Asia are already at Salonika; there is no place to receive them; they have to sleep in the streets, parks, churches. The staggering proportions of the tragedy are unrealisable, for the avalanche of Thracian migrations has only just begun.
The earlier refugees were housed in four big camps on the outskirts of the city, which were built for the British Army during the thrust for Gallipoli. Seventy per cent of these people are stricken with malaria from the swamps about the city, and disease cannot be coped with, quinine being unavailable. The start of the rainy season is expected daily, when pneumonia will take a heavy toll, even if cholera and typhus can be staved off.
The camps present vivid scenes of horror. Dozens of persons—aged men and women, young girls who have been outraged by the Turks, wives who saw their husbands seized and taken to Angora—have been driven insane by terror. They wander through packed, ill-smelling barracks, shouting and cursing, singing and weeping, unheeded by the listless, hopeless thousands who surround them. Old people separated from their families, and unable to care for themselves, die on the barracks floors, their bodies lying unnoticed until stumbled upon by relief workers. Hundreds of orphans fight through the crowd hoping to find their parents; hundreds of mothers pace endlessly from group to group seeking their children.
Dozens of babies, some three or four months old, some born during the flight, have been abandoned and picked up by other refugees who are now caring for them. I saw one old man of seventy, himself separated from his family during the flight, sit on the ground holding a nursing bottle to the lips of a few weeks' old child who had been thrust into his arms at the moment of embarkation from Smyrna. In the crowded, noisy church filled with refugees, an Armenian girl of fifteen cared for a new-born baby which she said had been left beside her as she slept.
As I picked my way among the crowds I was constantly besieged by half-insane women, who were weeping and begged me to go to Kemal Pasha and plead with him to spare their captured husbands, who they believe have been taken to Angora to be 'slaughtered' in revenge. All the refugees tell hideous stories of Turkish brutality; one man asserting that when the Turks entered the village of Moskonissea, in Asia Minor, they shot fifteen men, heaped their bodies in the public square, saturated them with gasoline, and burned them. The refugees declare that the Turkish officers, billeted in the houses, took the pick of the women and families of the chief Greeks.
Note: In 1915 Lex William Kluttz (1894-1950) graduated from Davidson College. At the beginning of the Great War he enlisted in the US army serving in both the American Expeditionary Forces and the Army of Occupation. Soon after he went to the Near East to study the country of the Bible and to see the work of the Near East Relief aid organization. Kluttz also taught for three years at the American University of Beirut, Syria. He was also connected with the YMCA. The above account is from a 1922 interview conducted with Otis Swift, a correspondent of the Chicago Tribune.