page_title: Ruth A. Parmelee
section_title: Witness to the Armenian Genocide
hierarchical_section_title: Ruth A. Parmelee / Armenian Genocide witness / Witness to the Armenian Genocide
caption_attribution_description: English: Armenians are marched to a nearby prison in Mezireh by Ottoman soldiers. Harput (Kharpert), Elazığ Province, Ottoman Empire, April, 1915
context_page_description: Ruth Azneve Parmelee was a Christian missionary and a witness to the Armenian Genocide. She served as a nurse of the American Women's Hospitals Service to a local hospital in Kharpert. She was also instrumental in the founding in 1922 of the hospital of the American Women's Hospitals Service in Salonika, Greece.
context_section_description: 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.
caption: Armenian civilians, escorted by armed Ottoman soldiers, are marched through Harput (Kharpert), to a prison in the nearby Mezireh (present-day Elâzığ), April 1915.
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