Ruth A Parmelee

Early life

Ruth A. Parmelee was born in Trabzon, Trebizond Vilayet, Ottoman Empire, on 3 April 1885, to parents who served as missionaries in the region. She received her early education from her parents until she was eleven, when the family moved to the United States. She attended Oberlin High School in Oberlin, Ohio, and then continued her education at Oberlin College, where in 1907 she graduated with a B.A. degree. She next attended the University of Illinois, where she graduated with a medical degree. Thereafter, she went to Philadelphia and interned at the Philadelphia Women's Hospital to practice nursing. In 1914 she went to Kharpert (today Harput) to serve as a missionary for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. She learned Armenian and Turkish and taught at the local Euphrates College.

Background

Having lost its Christian-majority Balkan possessions in the Balkan Wars, fears had intensified within the ranks of the Ottoman government that a similar push for independence by the Armenians—Turkey's largest remaining Christian minority, situated in the heart of Anatolia—might lead to the breakup of Turkey itself. Aware of the Ottomans' growing hostility, some Armenians, particularly in the Vilayet of Van, had begun stockpiling weapons and ammunition for self-defence, fearing a repetition of the massacres of 1905, but these activities only strengthened Ottoman suspicions of Armenian intentions.

Following the outbreak of World War I, mutual distrust between Turks and Armenians reached almost intolerable levels when, in early 1915, Turkey was invaded both by the British at Gallipoli and Russia from the east. The Russian thrust into Van Vilayet, spearheaded by Russo-Armenian units, was quickly blamed by the Ottoman leadership on alleged collaboration by the Van Armenians, and extreme measures against the mostly defenceless Armenian populace were authorized, resulting in massacres, the siege of Van, and eventually, the Armenian Genocide.

Witness to the Armenian Genocide

During the Armenian Genocide, Parmelee was stationed in Kharpert where she continued to conduct her missionary activities. She is believed to have been the only physician in the town. Therefore, she was often preoccupied with caring of those suffering from the events. In the beginning stages of the Armenian Genocide, Parmelee recounts the initial arrests of the Armenian intellectuals of the town:

On May 1, 1915 the first group of influential Armenian men were gathered up and put into prison. This company included merchants, priests, college professors etc. The names of the latter were Tennekejian, Boujancanian, Lulejian, Soghigian. The first three of those mentioned, suffered terrible torture. One procedure which was used to torture Professor Lulejian was to throw him into a fearfully ill-smelling Turkish closet, after having beaten him unconscious.

Parmelee later writes that other groups of influential men were "bound together, taken out by night under strong guard to a desolate spot and massacred by their guards."

She then adds:

Among the groups of men to be gathered up and imprisoned in Harput during June 1915 was one group of middle-aged and old men. What a shout of anguish arose from the neighborhood when they saw this group of men being taken down the hill to the prison at Mezereh. Among this number was one man, by name of Hagop Benneyan, a man so feeble that a trip to the market and back was sufficient to tire him; when the officers came to arrest him in his home, he begged them to kill him right there, for he said he could not take the journey. But they obliged him to go to prison with them and then out on the road. He left behind an aged wife and three daughters of rather feeble health. When the families of this quarter of the city were sent into exile, these four feeble women had to go with them. Word came back afterwards the two older women of the family, the mother and the oldest daughter, had succumbed by the roadside and the two younger daughters who had been teachers in our school, had been seen wrapped about each other, utterly naked, on a burning plain near Oorfa.

Parmelee continued to describe the eventual massacre of groups of men from the town:

The most authentic news that we had of the slaughter of a company of men sent out from prison was brought by our own druggist. His group of 800 men had been taken out not many hours from Harput, bound together in groups of four, and under strong guard. This man (Melkon Lulejian, brother of Professor Donabed Garabed Lulejian) found himself cut loose from his bonds, and escaped from the midst of the killing. His companions who were not able like himself, were being deliberately killed by their own guards.

While the male population was being imprisoned, the deportations for the town was already underway. The deportees consisted mostly of women and children. Parmelee described the conditions of the deportees:

It is too harrowing to try to describe the outrages committed day by day for weeks, on these thousands of deportees along the road, then for most of them to be killed outright-perhaps by drowning in a river or to drop dead from hunger, thirst, and fatigue.

Later life

After the end of World War I, Parmelee went to the United States. She then returned to the Ottoman Empire to help out in the relief efforts of the refugees for the American Women's Hospitals Service (AWH). In 1922 she went to Greece where she helped found the AWH hospital in Salonika for the care of Greek refugees of the Greco-Turkish War. She was an instrumental figure in the founding of a nursing school for which she served as the president until 1941. In 1941, she went to the United States, where she remained the rest of her life.

Ruth A. Parmelee died in Concord, New Hampshire, on 15 December 1973.

Works