Smyrna, September 1922

The American Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century's First Genocide

De: Lou Ureneck

Narrado por: David de Vries

The year was 1922: World War I had just come to a close, the Ottoman Empire was in decline, and Asa Jennings, a YMCA worker from upstate New York, had just arrived in the quiet coastal city of Smyrna to teach sports to boys. Several hundred miles to the east in Turkey's interior, tensions between Greeks and Turks had boiled over into deadly violence.

Mustapha Kemal, now known as Ataturk, and his Muslim army soon advanced into Smyrna, a Christian city, where a half a million terrified Greek and Armenian refugees had fled in a desperate attempt to escape his troops. Turkish soldiers proceeded to burn the city and rape and kill countless Christian refugees. Unwilling to leave with the other American civilians and determined to get Armenians and Greeks out of the doomed city, Jennings worked tirelessly to feed and transport the thousands of people gathered at the city's Quay.

With the help of the brilliant naval officer and Kentucky gentleman Halsey Powell, and a handful of others, Jennings commandeered a fleet of unoccupied Greek ships and was able to evacuate a quarter million innocent people - an amazing humanitarian act that has been lost to history, until now. Before the horrible events in Turkey were complete, Jennings had helped rescue a million people.

©2015 Lou Ureneck (P)2020 Tantor

Detailed and Heartwrenching

My grandparents were Greeks raised in Turkey. This book made me relive what they went through during their final years in Asia Minor. Thank you to the author for his tremendous research effort and to the reader for doing a superb job.

Horrific!

Very informative. I struggled to finish the book because I could only take so much misery in a sitting. I would put away and go back to it a month later. If this was on the silver screen it would be x rated for violence. Today, few people know of this terrible part of human history and even fewer know of the existence of the Greeks of Asia Minor, barely 100 years ago.

Important and Well researched story

The author did an incredible and highly professional job writing this text. In this story, you see both the greatest and worst aspects of humanity on display. Torture, rape, murder in extreme proportions. At the same time, mercy, compassion, and devotion to God as a catalyst for great good. An incredible story.

Only detraction was pronunciation of Turkish words.