Humanitarian work in Lebanon focused on the orphans of Aintura, a village to the north of Beirut near Zouk Mikayel, where the Lazariste fathers had run a middle school that the Turkish authorities took over and converted into an orphanage. The Aintura orphanage accommodated some twelve hundred Armenian and Kurdish orphans; most of the Armenians came from Gürün, Kayseri, and Sivas. Picked up by Turkish officials on the deportation routes, these Armenian children had been sent to Aintura to be educated by the standards prevailing in Young Turk circles. This institution was by no means the only one of its kind. In Urfa, Mardin, Adana, Kayseri, and elsewhere, the Ottoman authorities had opened similar orphanages for the purpose of Turkifying Armenian children. Aintura, however, was considered exemplary. It was directed by Halide Edib, a writer and Young Turk nationalist whose mission was to make Turks of the orphans entrusted to her care. From the day they entered the orphanage, they were given Muslim first names and an identification number. They were strictly forbidden to speak Armenian and severely punished if they did: the bastinado was the usual sanction.99 At the time, Lebanon was in the thrones of a terrible famine manifestly engineered by the Young Turk regime; it carried off tens of thousands of Lebanese. The orphanage, too, was hard hit, and around one-third of the children succumbed to the adverse conditions.100 When the Allied troops entered Aintura, they found eight hundred children in the institution; the others had perished.101 Read all
The Genocide Survivors in Lebanon and Palestine at the End of World War I
The orphanage in Aintura, with its supervisor Halide Edib, center, its teaching staff, and its Armenian wards in 1918 (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).