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. This is its first publication, edited with an introduction by Nancy Klancher (University of Pittsburgh). Mary Super was an American Red Cross Nurse sent to South East Turkey in order to help reduce the suffering of the'Armenian population after the events following World War I. She was in Hadjin, Cilicia in1920 when Turkish and Kurdish Kemalists besieged the small mountain town for two months. Mary's memoirs tell the story of her time in Cilicia and of the siege.