Testimony: Edith Wood

Edith Wood in her American Woman's Hospital uniform
(Reproduced from Certain Samaritans (1933) by Esther Pohl Lovejoy)

It was like an endless chain. The children would often be gone before I had taken their names. Forty to fifty of the older women passed on each day also. You see, starvation, exposure, exhaustion did their work before these deportees arrived at Malatia. They came to me in the last stages.

Food and medicine were no good, although I tried my best, The Turks were doing nothing at all for them. In Malatia bodies lay around in the streets and fields. No attempt was made to bury them. Deportation is worse than a sentence of execution. Unless one sees these things, it is difficult to believe that such monstrous cruelty and barbarity exist in this world. Making women and children suffer that way until they drop and expire seems incredible. But that is Malatia, and they receive us coldly in Constantinople when we want to tell what we know for the benefit of our Government, and let it appear very clearly that my story is unwelcome and that I am a hysterical woman exaggerating or falsifying—that is the way it is.

It took me fourteen days' constant travel to get from Malatia to Samsun on the Black Sea coast, where I took a vessel for Constantinople last Thursday. All the way it was a heartrending journey, passing women and little children on their long road to Calvary. And I knew what was at the end of it! I hardly pitied those who had given up en route. Bodies lay along the roadside and in the fields everywhere. There was no hope for the Greeks from Malatia to Samsun, and the most fortunate were those who perished at the start.

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Note: Miss Edith Wood of Philadelphia worked in Kharput and later in Malatia as a Red Cross nurse with the Near East Relief