“An oracle within my heart concerning the transgression of the wicked.  There is no fear of God before his eyes.”

In The Burning Tigris,  (Peter Balakian, 2003) describes the astounding evil perpetrated against the Armenians over a period spanning decades, culminating in perhaps the best known events occurring around 1915.   I’ve been trying to get my heart and mind around what was done deliberately, systematically and~~worst of all~~quite publicly to these people.

(p.age 191) “Some of the most striking evidence of the use of the railway for deporting the Armenians comes from the German eyewitness accounts of the Baghdad Railway Company.  Germany’s most important foreign project, the company was at the center of the kaiser’s imperial designs in the Near East….Franz Gunther, a delegate of the Deutsche Bank who headed the project’s office in Constantinople and worked closely with the German embassy, reported that the Ottoman government was acting with ‘bestial cruelty’ and noted that it was hard to justify the company’s passivity in the face of what they were witnessing.”

(page 194) “An American, Mrs. Anna Harlow Birge, who was traveling from Smyrna to Constantinople, wrote in November 1915:

“At every station where we stopped, we came side by side with one of these trains.  It was made up of cattle-trucks, and the faces of little children were looking out from behind the tiny barred windows of each truck.  The side doors were wide open, and one could plainly see old men and old woman, young mothers with tiny babies, men, women, and children, all huddled together like so many sheep or pigs–human beings treated worse than cattle are treated.“

And government planning about these trains is reflected again on page 195:

“In order to extort as much money as possible from the Armenians, the Turkish authorities often forced them to pay first-class fare before they put them into the cattle cars that would most likely take them to their deaths.”