The Beginnings of the Humanitarian Era in the Eastern Mediterranean

Marash, Anatolia, February 9, 1920.As the Armenians of Marash fled their city in the face of civil war and the certainty of massacre, a twentythree-year-old American Near East Relief (NER) official, Stanley E. Kerr, made the decision to stay behind in the organization’s headquarters to care for the hundreds of children and elderly who could not travel. He was one of a tiny handful of Americans who remained in the war-torn city as other relief workers evacuated with the able-bodied and the retreating French army. “Tonight,” Kerr wrote to his parents back home in Philadelphia, “the most bitter cold