Testimony: Elias Venezis (1904-1973)
Elias Venezis (1904-1973)
Thus it was that one morning they took about sixty of us slave laborers for a small-scale forced-labor. The job was a little outside the town of Manisa. Near the railroad tracks there reaches a huge ravine within Mount Sipylo. It is called Kirtikdere. It is reckoned that some 40,000 Christian men and women from Smyrna and Manisa were slaughtered during the first days of catastrophe. The corpses began to disintegrate and the water of the ravine, which descended from mountain, began to drive the corpses to the edge of the ravine where they reached the road and railroad tracks. Since the Spaniard Dallara, seated in his Wagon-lit train, smoking a cigar, would have been looking out of his window and marveling at the beauty of the landscape, he would suddenly see the corpses. It would have been like the burst of some bomb-shell. Accordingly, our labor battalion was obliged, all day long, to shove the corpses back into the ravine so that they could not be seen. In the beginning this labor consisted of grasping and holding in our arms these corpses and thus to carry them away. It was repugnant labor. But after a few hours these emotional reactions passed and the slave laborers began to make a macabre joke of their task.
“What are you holding?”’ one would ask.
The other looks down at what he is holding in his embrace, and as he continues walking, he replies: “Two Skulls, five shin bones, six teeth.”
"Are they male or female?”
“They seem to be male.”
“You have not looked carefully, comrade.”
On a number of shin and hand bones we found pieces of wire. The Christians must have been tied to one another ... but with the downward journey [carried by the current of the water] the accompanying skeleton must have torn loose from its partner.
“Look here,” he said. It was a little child. On seeing this, the disturbed Muslim guard murmured, “Allah! Allah!”
“How old was it?”
“Well it must have been two years old.”
Early in the evening we had finished our job. The Sergeant goes to the railroad tracks to see if anything is visible from the tracks. Nothing was to be seen, and he reported:
“Everything is in order.”
On our return we stopped at a spring and washed our hands and faces, in order to have some relief. One of our comrades asked, “What will become of the bones?” Miltos looked at him calmly:
“Don’t you know what happens to the bones?”
“No.”
“They become fertilizer, comrade.”
“What?”
“Fertilizer. You will see, for one day it will sell at a good price. You will see.”
Miltos was a man who had traveled about, and he knew many things:
“Certainly, it will happen exactly like this: One day there will arrive from Southampton a certain person. He will straighten his eyeglasses, and he will examine the goods [the bones]. ... He will grade the quality extra-fine for chemical fertilizer. ‘How much a ton?’ he will ask.
‘So much’
And the purchaser will say: “But elsewhere we purchased Turkish goods, Bulgarian goods, Russian goods for less.”
But the local commercial agent will respond, “But this is real Greek material.”
“Really, it is genuine?”
“Yes.”
“Well, in that case I shall pay the price.”
And so the purchaser will agree to a price one kurush higher inasmuch as Pericles and Ictinos have entered the equation.
Note: At the age of 18, Elias Venezis (1904-1973), a native of Ayvali / Kidonies, was conscripted into a labor battalion where he served for 14 months. Of the 3,000 conscripts in his labor brigade only 23 survived. He later went on to describe his plight and that of his compatriots in his work Number 31328.
Source: Excerpted from Venezis' book Το Νούμερο 31328: Το βιβλίο της σκλαβιάς [Number 31328: The book of slavery] and translated from Greek by Speros Vryonis (See: Vryonis, Speros, "Greek Labor Battalions in Asia Minor", The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies (ed. Richard G. Hovannisian), New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction Publishers, 2007, pp. 284-285).