Dobkin's book is brilliant, and should be assigned reading for students of 20th century history. Visitors to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC learn that Hitler cited the Turkish genocide of the Armenian and Greek populations of Asia Minor from 1915-23 as inspiration for the NAZI genocide. Now, Dobkin captures the last act of the Turkish genocide, the 1923 burning of Smyrna. The US Counsel at Smyrna, George Horton, having witnessed the Turkish atrocities, subsequently wrote that, "One of the keenest impressions which I brought away with me from Smyrna was a feeling of shame that I belonged to the human race." Holocaust revisionists...are now denying that the event took place. Dobkin's book serves as a warning to future regimes planning similar acts that their crimes will never be forgotten.

The first thing I want to say about SMYRNA 1922 is that I am of neither Greek nor Turkish descent so I have no vested interest in the "truth". Secondly, I have an Armenian friend who once told me in a sad but offhand way as we were trading confidences over coffee, that her grandparents had been buried in the sand up to their necks and had their heads lopped off by Turkish soldiers. Thirdly, I had an occasion once where I met with a Turkish delegation as part of my job and listened to them for two hours while they talked about "Armenian lies." Two things struck me about this rather bizarre meeting: 1) Why did they care what I or anyone else in my agency thought about something that happened many years ago? 2) Why did they go on for two hours denying something no one had accused them of, at least no one in my office?

Marjorie Dobkin's insightful book is about the failure of the Great Powers, including the U.S., to facilitate a peaceful outcome in Anatolia in the period following WWI. SMYRNA covers the subsequent destruction of the city by the forces of Kemal Attaturk (although he apparently lay the blame for the massacre at his predecessor's door). Following the destruction of Smyrna, almost two million Greek and Armenian Christian refugees fled what is today Turkey and was then the Ottoman Empire.

At the Cannes film festival this year, "Ararat" has won all sorts of praise. The film by Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter) tells the story of the Armenian holocaust in 1922. I don't know if Dobkin's book is the basis of the film, but it certainly would make great background reading. I suspect 'Ararat' will become to the Armenians what 'Schindler's List' has become to the Jews. Since Turkey is apparently vowing to fight its distribution (New York Times, Arts, 6/7/02) it remains to be seen whether the film will make it to the states.

Dobkin has assembled a huge amount of information for her book and provides copious footnotes so you can check the sources. However, many of the U.S. sailors and other eyewitnesses have died since the first edition was published about 30 years ago. Following the initial publication, Dobkin became aware of much more material, and she incorporated much of the new material in the book. Dobkin writes well--like an excellent investigative reporter, which she very well may be. Earnest Hemingway covered the disaster as a Toronto news reporter, and Dobkin's writing is comparable his, as well as being very scholarly.

I've spent most of my life reading about genocide and inhumanity in one form or another, but SMYRNA has to be one of the most harrowing tales I've ever read. Think Dachau. Think Auschwitz. Think the worst. To bad CNN wasn't filming, although believe it or not someone did film the event--and Dobkin obtained a photo of the quay lined with over 200,000 people which is shown on the cover of the book. Smyrna makes Kosovo look like a picnic.

A moving account of the Greek-Turkish war of 1919-22 that ended with the expulsion of the Greek and Armenian populations of Asia Minor. The book documents that the Greek-Turkish war of 1919-22 was not really a war between the Greeks and the Turks but a conflict between the British (using the Greeks as proxies) on one hand and the French and Italians on the other (using the Turks as proxies). The prize was the oil of what is now Iraq. (That country did not exist then; its area was still part of the Ottoman empire.) The author does an excellent job in documenting the role of the outsiders in stirring up trouble amongst the local populations. The competition between the Western European powers resulted in enormous suffering not only amongst the Greeks and Armenians but also amongst the Turks themselves.