The Great Fire: One American's Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century's First Genocide, by Lou Ureneck
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The Great Fire: One American's Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century's First Genocide, by Lou Ureneck
PDF Ebook The Great Fire: One American's Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century's First Genocide, by Lou Ureneck
The harrowing story of a Methodist Minister and a principled American naval officer who helped rescue more than 250,000 refugees during the genocide of Armenian and Greek Christians—a tale of bravery, morality, and politics, published to coincide with the genocide’s centennial.
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.
By turns harrowing and inspiring, The Great Fire uses eyewitness accounts, documents, and survivor narratives to bring this episode—extraordinary for its brutality as well as its heroism—to life.
The Great Fire: One American's Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century's First Genocide, by Lou Ureneck- Amazon Sales Rank: #380761 in Books
- Brand: Ureneck, Lou
- Published on: 2015-05-12
- Released on: 2015-05-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.56" w x 6.00" l, 1.42 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 512 pages
Review “Ureneck’s narrative is intense and vivid.” (Philadelphia Inquirer)“The Great Fire reads like a fast-paced thriller replete with vivid profiles of heroes, villains and ordinary people caught up in ethnic and religious violence.” (Associated Press)“This is a comprehensive yet intimate work of scholarship, reminding readers of a horrific moment in modern history now largely forgotten.” (Weekly Standard)“The Great Fire reads like a fast-paced thriller replete with vivid profiles of heroes, villains and ordinary people caught up in ethnic and religious violence.” (ABC News)“The Great Fire reads like a fast-paced thriller replete with vivid profiles of heroes, villains and ordinary people caught up in ethnic and religious violence.” (The Post and Courier)“[The Great Fire] is highly readable and paints a portrait of a pivotal period in world history.” (The Register Herald)Praise for Backcast:“This book is a rarity: humble in its beauty, elegant in its reflection.” (Anchorage Daily News)
From the Back Cover
A bribe, a lie and an empty threat—these were the tools Reverend Asa K. Jennings used to rescue hundreds of thousands of helpless refugees following the 1922 burning of Smyrna, the richest and most cosmopolitan city of the Ottoman Empire.
A minister from upstate New York, Jennings had arrived in Smyrna just as the final territorial dispute of World War I was being settled in a brutal war between the army of Greece and a force of Turkish rebels—fighting as proxies for WWI's European victors who had been unable to impose a treaty on the defeated Ottoman Empire. Hundreds of thousands of terrified Greek and Armenian refugees fled to Smyrna as Mustapha Kemal (known today as Ataturk) and his Moslem army advanced on the mostly Christian city. The Turkish soldiers set fire to the city and raped and killed countless Christian refugees while French, British, Italian, and American warships, under strict orders to remain neutral, stood immobile in the harbor.
The Great Fire tells the harrowing and inspiring story of Jennings and a strong-willed naval officer, Lt. Commander Halsey Powell, who together orchestrated one of the century's greatest humanitarian missions. Emboldened by his religious faith, Jennings worked tirelessly to feed and transport the thousands of desperate people while Powell, a war hero and Kentucky gentleman, skirted orders so that he could bring America's Navy to the rescue. By the time the horrible events in Turkey had ended, Jennings and Powell had helped rescue almost a million refugees.
Drawing extensively from survivors' stories, fresh primary sources, and years of research, Ureneck has painted an unforgettable portrait of the fire at Smyrna—the symbolic end of five hundred years of Ottoman rule and the final act in a ten-year religious slaughter. This gripping narrative reveals forces that would define the rest of the century: virulent nationalism, trading oil for national principles, and conflict and misunderstanding between the Christian West and Moslem East. This is an astonishing look at a pivotal, but little known, moment in our history viewed through the lens of the hopeful story of two men who faced a savage crisis with an unshakeable decency.
About the Author
Lou Ureneck, a former Nieman fellow and editor-in-residence at Harvard University, is a professor of journalism at Boston University. Ureneck is the author of Backcast, which won the National Outdoor Book Award for literary merit, and Cabin: Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine.
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Most helpful customer reviews
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful. Lou Ureneck educates and inspires with THE GREAT FIRE.. By Cyrus Webb This book took me a while to finish----and not just because it is almost 500 pages. I took my time, because THE GREAT FIRE educated me in a lot of ways I was not expecting, and I wanted to savor the experience.What Lou Ureneck has done is take us into an event that many of us (including myself) had no clue about and made us live the experience. That is not an easy thing to do, but because he humanized it by giving us the backstory into the key players during that time it made it real.Asa Jennings is someone who I had never heard of before reading THE GREAT FIRE. Now because of Ureneck I can't forget him. He realized and embraced his purpose in life and was willing to do all he could to be of help to others. Isn't that a great example for us all? He did this not only in the face of danger for himself but his family. There were individuals like Dr. Lovejoy that also put it all on the line, and because of her others were given home in the face of insurmountable difficulties and danger.This book is about the burning of Smyrna, Turkey and what led up to it, but it is also about the resilience of the human spirit and how even in the darkness there are always beacons of light used to light the way. THE GREAT FIRE reminds us why we can't give up, even when we can't see the way out of the troubles we face. It also reminds us that if we can't FIND the light we should strive to BE the light, not just for ourselves but for those who we might encourage.THE GREAT FIRE is one of those books you will find yourself thinking about long after you finish.
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful. If you want to understand the brutality of the Middle East Today, you must read this book. By DC Guy I just finished reading this book and I have a few observationsYou really should read this book, especially if you and your family have been Americans for many generations.And this suggestion is coming from a first generation American who grew up in a household where we were taught that "don't be like Americans, because Americans are very uneducated in how the world really is." of course we four would always respond,"but dad we were born in America" and his answer was "yes, but you are not like them because we educate you about the world."I’m an American, born here, who grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s outside of Philadelphia, with two brothers and a sister.Every September the four of us, while Dad was off at work, would have to team up and pitch in to run the house and to go shopping and to cook the meals while going to public school.This is because mom would disappear into what we called a haze. Mom would just stare off into space and mumble more prayers than we could count. All kinds of names, in a language that we didn’t really understand tumbled out.Mom had often embarrassed us, as she would tell strangers that she was educated at a place called the American College and learned many languages. She would talk of her education in all manner of important subjects. To us growing up, how could that be, she was married to a steady, stoic man who owned a hat cleaning and shoe shine parlor. Things were good in America, but mom in an advanced high school “back there,” in the old country? No way, America was not a backward place, “back there,” was.Countless times she told us stories of her childhood, and living in a land of wealth, with people of wealth with libraries, Oceanside villas and clubs, shops full of goods from around the world, with mills, merchants, three growing seasons and more all before September 1922. It all seemed made up and unreal. Then she would speak of what happened in September, 1922 and then the 9 years later living in a refugee camp. To us ,we could not understand how living in a refugee camp was different than camping out, as we saw in numerous Hollywood westerns.Even when, in 1958, a strange man showed up on one summer day, when we children were playing Monopoly on the front steps, we did not really grasp the enormity of what once happened. That man was her cousin, who as a 14 year old somehow dodged the execution squads, and walked though Central Turkey to Iraq, though Syria though Egypt and around to Algeria to France where finally rebuilt his life. But never in 36 years, never ever giving up the search everywhere he went in the world, as a textile importer, for lost living relatives.My brothers and I will always remember that day as my older bother and I kept him at bay while my younger brother ran inside to tell mom that “some guy,” who we could not understand was out on the front steps, and he looked different. Mom saw him, and started to cry and scream as he did, as they had not seen each other and each thought the other dead since a day in September 1922, as people around them were being shot by the Turkish Army as everybody was trying to get away from the burning parts of the city of Smyrna.I will put it simply, all the stories of the prosperity, the education the magnificence of the multi-ethnic Christian and Jewish community of Smyrna that my mother told us were absolutely on target.I will also put it very directly, all the stories that we as children and later adults, completely immersed in America thought, were “just too incredible” in terms of the brutality and butchery of violence by the Turks on those Christians were very true. After all, people don’t do those sorts of things here in America.The brutality, or as a Jewish scholar would later coin the word “genocide,” was all absolutely true. Mom was right. It was us who did no believe, because of the relatively pacific culture we picked up as we grew up in America.Too many individuals, covered in this book, witnessed the unspeakable violence.All of them reported absolutely clear, un biased descriptions of brutality against Christian populations.You owe it to yourself to read this book, if you want to get a grasp on understanding the same sort of Christian liquidations happing in today’s Middle East.It is kind of sad that with few exceptions, today, we Americans are reacting exactly the same was as Americans did in 1922.We don’t really care to the extent that we should because like the foreign powers tired from WW I we will not send our forces “back there” to protect and to rescue Christian refugees.To us our WWI was Iraq.As for my siblings and I, we are going to visit Mom’s grave and hold a service in her remembrance and apologize for letting our immersion in America cause us to not believe that these unspeakable horrors leading to the genocide of Christian populations did occur.As far as the country of Turkey, created by Ataturk, who masterminded the genocide of Christians, it is time, that Turkey issue a non weasel worded apology.No escape clauses, no ifs and ors or buts.The world has waited for your country's apology for almost 100 years. It is time to make amends and I don't want to hear stories about how “both sides” were bad. Perhaps the Christians started the troubles that led up to this Genocide, with the encouragement of mostly the French, Italians, Russians and even the US, because of the geo-political thirst for oil. But this genocide was not justified, as a genocide never is.This book is a must read.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful. Good read. Historical, but suspenseful By D. Kallas I thoroughly enjoyed this book. While the book is rich in historical fact, it reads like a suspenseful novel.It is a riveting account of the tragic events that took place 100 years ago in Turkey after WWI. The Turkish Nationalists sought to violently rid Turkey of Greeks and Armenians, culminating in the burning and destruction of the city of Smyrna. The book focuses on the relief efforts of two individuals, a missionary and a US Naval commander, who worked against all odds to save almost a million refugees. As the Turkish Nationalist army approaches Smyrna and the two men frantically devise a plan, the suspense builds and it becomes harder and harder to put the book down.Ureneck constructs multidimensional portraits of the major figures involved in this catastrophe which help us to better understand their actions. He also includes personal stories of some of the survivors which add a unique human dimension. Researching the book, Ureneck visited the actual sites where these events occurred. This enablesd him to paint vivid descriptions of the landscape and locales.Though there are both heroes and villains, in the end it is the story of the heroes that rose to the occasion using every available resource and against all odds saved many more lives than anyone could have thought possible. It is a true story of the triumph of the human spirit.
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