A Massacre Averted: An Armenian Town, an American Nurse and the Turkish Army They Resisted

Between 1920 and 1923, American relief workers managed to prevent the massacre of three hundred Armenian orphans at the hands of Turkish and Kurdish troops. One of them, a nurse, kept a diary that illuminated in dramatic detail the struggle against genocide in the midst of civil war. The 1920 siege of Hadjin, as narrated in the memoirs, involved strategic restraint and control on the part of all who found themselves there. It required intercultural and inter-religious exchange, and a suspension of wholesale massacre, if not serious violence.