Halide Edib Adıvarthe BeaconENFJ

In 1916, Halide Edib (also spelled Edip), a celebrated Turkish writer in her early thirties, spoke with Cemal Pasha, the Ottoman commander in Syria, and objected to the orphanage he wanted her to help run.

The orphanage was at Antoura, in Mount Lebanon, in the buildings of a Catholic school, the Collège Saint-Joseph. Its children were orphans of the Armenian Genocide, with Kurdish children among them: about a thousand Armenians and two hundred Kurds, by one count.

She saw at once what the place was for. Ten years later, in her Memoirs, she recalled asking him plainly.

Cemal called her an idealist. This was a Muslim orphanage, he said. He could not bear to see the children die in the streets, and after the war they would go back to their people. She refused to take part. Then she accepted, “as a duty towards humanity.”

Beacons will recognize the argument that moved her. It offers a kind heart only two choices: help on these terms, or watch children die. It flatters the urge to help and hides who set the terms. The children of Antoura had not been rescued from the streets. They had been taken from orphanages that already existed.

One of them was a small boy named Karnig Panian. Decades later he wrote down what he remembered. The boys were given Turkish names and numbers; his number was 551. Speaking Armenian was punished with beatings, carried out by the director, Fevzi Bey, in Halide's presence.

At sunset, as the flag came down, the children were made to cheer for Cemal Pasha. They went hungry, and by one count hundreds of them died there before the war ended.

They resisted with the smallest tools there are. They spoke Armenian in secret, shared their bread, and kept their real names when the public ones were Turkish names or numbers. When the war ended and the staff left, most of the Armenian children went back to who they had been.

Halide went on to become a national figure. She spoke to vast crowds in occupied Istanbul in 1919, served as a sergeant in the War of Independence, lived in exile, and later sat in parliament. Many in Turkey honor her still. In her 1926 Memoirs she told Antoura as a work of rescue. The children remembered something else.

Both memories are real, and her story is here because of the gap between them. She cared about children. She believed in shaping the young toward a better future. She had a powerful patron who needed her. Those strengths are common among Beacons, and at Antoura someone else decided what they were for.

She died in Istanbul on 9 January 1964, aged 79.

Before she ever took charge, she had named the wrong to the most powerful man in the region. The boys who kept their own names in secret held the line she had drawn and then let go.