Blood-Dark Track

by Joseph O'Neill

  The new cell was painted completely black. A large crucifix hung on one wall and at the centre of the crucifix was written, in Turkish, ‘Tonight’. That night a guard opened the peephole and said, ‘You see that bearded face on the wall? An Armenian murderer scratched that picture with his nails on the night before his execution. At four in the morning, he was taken away and hanged.’

  Dakak, worn out by lack of sleep and malnourishment, spent that night and the days and nights that followed in terror of execution. He also suffered from dehydration: it was August, the black cell was a furnace, and he was given nothing to drink from six in the evening to six in the morning; only in response to his cries would a mouthful of water sometimes be poured through the hole in his door.

  He went on hunger strike and shouted for his consul. After ten days of fasting and protest, he was informed that his consul was coming. He stopped his hunger strike. However, when the visitor arrived three days later, Dakak became afraid and did not believe that he was the consul. ‘As a consequence,’ my grandfather wrote, ‘I did not speak freely to the gentleman or voice complaints about how I was being tortured.’

  After three months in the Prison of the Sands, Joseph Dakak was returned to the French prison in Beirut and placed in a cell with four other so-called detainees. Although his mental well-being had improved after the consul’s visit, returning to this environment sent Dakak rapidly into reverse. As ever, he had to listen to his cellmates’ horror stories, and on the second day one of them (who claimed to be from Adana) said to the guards in a stage whisper clearly audible to Dakak, ‘Tell the commander that enough is enough, it’s time to finish with this man; hanging, shooting, it doesn’t matter, just so long as it’s done.’ The guard returned a little while later and said, ‘Everything’s arranged. It’s all been set up for four o’clock tomorrow morning.’

  Shocked, Dakak ran to the balcony and threw himself down into the prison’s interior courtyard. My grandfather wrote: ‘I preferred to kill myself than face the rope or the bullet. It wasn’t until later that it dawned on me that everything they did was part of a strategy of psychological torture.’

  In its hallucinatory, ghastly, and temporally fluid progression, the testimony uncannily corresponded to a nightmare; and reading it, I was by now fighting for my breath. The suicide attempts, the mental torture, the self-mutilations, the cell transfers, the food poisonings, the suspicions, the unceasing distress at the centre of it all: repetitive and demanding and interminable and horrifying, my grandfather’s grievances filled the pages like fumes. A part of me was irritated by the author of this airless, woebegone account, which made an incoherent and overly direct claim on my pity and too readily assumed assent to its tormented speculations – and, of course, a part of me consequently felt guilty: for I recognized in myself the strange mercilessness of the disobliged reader. However, I wasn’t an ordinary reader. I was the writer’s grandson. I couldn’t flee the scene. I had to persevere and attempt to understand something about Joseph’s ordeals, which he had taken such trouble to record.

  My grandfather could not remember exactly how he threw himself over the balcony in the French Military Prison. When he came to, after four hours of unconsciousness, he was back at the infirmary at the Prison of Sands. His right leg was broken and he had a cut by his right eyebrow. The next day he was transferred to the government hospital in Beirut, where his leg was put in plaster.

  Joseph Dakak stayed at the hospital for seven months (which suggested injuries more serious than a simple broken leg). He was nursed by a Spanish nun called Sister Inias. She visited him every night for two hours of prayers and conversation. The talk covered a variety of subjects and ranged from religion to politics to the stories in the Beirut newspapers which the nun smuggled in every day. Sister Inias would ask Dakak his opinion of current events – in particular, how he expected Turkey to act. Other times, she would tell him stories of how the Turks had slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Armenians. She told him that the Turks did not like Christians and that as a Christian he should not expect anything from his consulate.

  My grandfather concluded that Sister Inias was a spy, and that she was saying these things about Turkey in order to demoralize him and tempt him into a betrayal of his own country.

  During the last weeks of his stay at the hospital (in March and April 1943), a patient called Aram Hachadourian was put in the bed next to my grandfather. Hachadourian had hardly lain his head on his pillow before he’d revealed that, although a native of Gaziantep, he had lived in Iskenderun for the last forty years and was the uncle of the wife of Joseph Ayvazian, the proprietor of a hotel at Soguk Oluk in the Amanus mountains. Hachadourian said that Ayvazian had been mistreated by the Turks, who wouldn’t permit anyone stay at his hotel because of remarks he’d allegedly made in favour of the Germans.

  I was startled to read this: Ayvazian was the man identified by C.T.C. Taylor, the SIME agent, as a German spy.

  Hachadourian quizzed Dakak about the well-known people of Iskenderun and about Turkish Armenians photographed in a magazine published in 1937 or 1938 called Armanian. Dakak didn’t recognize any of them. Aram Hachadourian complained to my grandfather that in 1939 the Turks had forced him to leave Iskenderun and had frozen the bank account credited with the proceeds of the sale of his house, money which there was now not the slightest hope of recovering. ‘Aram Hachadourian,’ my grandfather wrote, ‘came up with any old anti-Turkish rubbish because he, too, was a spy.’

  At around this time, Sister Inias arranged a visit by Joseph Dakak’s Beirut cousin, Alida Hannah. The nun told Alida, ‘Don’t be too long, I’ll take care of the guard next door’; and to Dakak’s astonishment the guard, who had never before left his post, disappeared. Joseph and Alida spoke for ten minutes. She assured him that Nazim Gandour and his brother Fazil were being tortured and were in a pitiful state. Nazim, Dakak retorted, was nothing other than an English spy.

  Hachadourian, in the bed right next to Dakak’s, listened to every word. My grandfather subsequently came to the sad realization that his cousin and Hachadourian were working together and that everything she’d said had been for the Armenian’s benefit. ‘There is no doubt at all that this was the arrangement,’ my grandfather wrote in his testimony.

  Two weeks later, Joseph Dakak was removed from the hospital and transferred to Palestine. On 5 May 1943, they brought him to a monastery situated between Jerusalem and Ramle, in a village called Emuas.

  The monastery was surrounded by barbed wire and held thirty-three men, including Greeks, Germans, Albanians, Arabs, Serbians, Poles and Italians. By this time, my grandfather stated, he had come to understand the devious ways of the English and the subterfuges they used to extract information from him. It did not take him more than a day, therefore, to realize that the thirty-three men were all spies for the English and that at their head was none other than Nazim Gandour. As soon as a newcomer arrived a the camp, he would ostensibly be mobbed for news. The conversation would then be manipulated in such a way that the new arrival ended up by questioning Dakak. In this way, over the course of one and a half years, the number of inmates rose from thirty-three to eighty-eight. At the rate of about two a fortnight, fresh agents were sent to the monastery to do their work.

  A familiar feeling of dismay overcame me – the feeling lawyers get when their witness comes out with a statement that abruptly deflates the balloon of credibility he has laboriously puffed up. It was simply impossible that an entire internment camp might be devoted to extracting information (information about what, incidentally?) from one prisoner. My grandfather was clearly a writer in the grip of paranoia.

  I felt a strong pang of pity. That Joseph – an authoritative, punctilious man who (in Amy’s words) never exaggerated and never said that he had eaten three figs if he’d only eaten two – had been reduced to this state of miscomprehension was a measure of the depth of his fall.

  But this development did not lead me to distrust the whole of his testimon
y. A witness may be reliable in certain respects and unreliable in others. My grandfather was not lying about the role of his fellow prisoners; he was simply deluded about it. His paranoia therefore did not make me especially sceptical of his version of physically observable events (especially, because I was always conscious that the testimony was, as lawyers say, a self-serving statement), but of course it made his interpretation of them doubtful – doubtful, but not necessarily wrong. The fact that a man is paranoiac does not mean that he is immune to conspiracies to harm him.

  My grandfather continued his story of his persecution in saddening detail. They used a variety of ruses to question him, he stated. One bizarre trick was to give the prisoners names that were exactly, or almost exactly, the same as the names of the political leaders of their country in the hope that this would subconsciously induce Dakak to volunteer information about the men in question. They had another strange ploy: they would bring in so-called prisoners who bore a striking resemblance to persons about whom they sought information. For example, long ago there had been in Mersin an Italian consul called Moki, and so there materialized an Italian prisoner who looked exactly like Moki and who began to speak to Dakak in Italian. And another Italian ‘prisoner’ strongly resembled the Italian consul who succeeded Moki in Mersin. Joseph Dakak wrote:

  During the two and a half years that I spent in the monastery, they used these and any other ruse you could think of in order to extract from me the slightest piece of information about events that were taking place in every corner of the world and about the people involved in such events. As time went by, I understood better and better what was going on, namely that the English would go to any length to uncover anyone who might have some connection to the Nazis or who might be Anglophobic. Names would be suggested to me in conversations or in the newspapers and magazines that were brought to me, and my reaction would be noted. The spies surrounded me incessantly, and chief among them was, of course, Nazim Gandour. This is how the days passed.

  He continued:

  Because of the pressure, intimidation, psychological torture and poisonings that I endured, my heart weakened and I contracted the condition which I suffer from to this day. Instead of providing me with medical care, they did everything to wear me out and aggravate my cardiac condition. Every time they found reason for dissatisfaction, they stepped up the torture: they put a spade in my hands and despite my poorly condition made me dig in the field next to the monastery, carry rocks, and unload wood from lorries. To ensure the destruction of my physical and mental health, they made me suffer every torture imaginable, the spies taking it in turn to seize on to the most trivial matter to vex me and pick an argument. This programme was carried out so systematically and relentlessly that it would have been the easiest thing in the world to surrender one’s sanity. They lodged me on the second floor of the building in order to force me to climb up and down the stairs if I wanted to do the slightest thing. When the doctor finally examined me, I was told that there was nothing wrong with me, that it was all in my mind. They did not grant me the privileges that the other spying inmates enjoyed and constantly assigned me the hardest work, inventing pointless and demanding tasks for this purpose.

  Joseph Dakak was alone in the basement when a guard told him that the war was over. Three days later, they once again moved him to the upstairs floor, and it was there that he read in the newspapers that the legislation authorizing internment without trial had been repealed and that internees had been freed. However, a month passed and still Dakak was not released. He wrote a letter to the Turkish consul and, when this went unanswered, a second letter. Finally, four months after the end of the European war, he wrote to a letter of protest to Major Prendergast at the Defence Security Office in Jerusalem.

  Two nights later, the prison commander, Captain Sylvester, said to him, ‘Get ready, you’re off tomorrow.’ Dakak replied, ‘Could you please inform the head of your office in Jerusalem that I wish to see him.’ ‘I see. Might I ask why?’ ‘For three and a half years, you have kept me imprisoned,’ Dakak said, ‘even though I am innocent. You have caused me great psychological and financial damage, and on top of all this, you’ve made me suffer from this malady of the heart. I wish to claim damages and interest in respect of these losses.’ The Englishman smiled unpleasantly and said, ‘I’m going to give you some advice. Ask your Turkish government for compensation.’

  The next morning, Dakak was called into Captain Sylvester’s office and presented with a typed letter to sign. By this point, his belongings were in the waiting lorry outside and they were shouting at him to get a move on. Even so, he cast an eye over the paper and saw that it asserted that he had been well looked after during his detention and that his property had been restored to him in full. My grandfather said, ‘No, I won’t sign that. I cannot betray my conscience. If it was simply concerned with money, I would sign without hesitation. But this letter does not tell the truth about how I have been treated and I will not sign it.’ At this, another document was quickly typed in triplicate. Dakak read it and, seeing that it mentioned money and nothing more, put his name to it. He dashed to the waiting lorry and climbed quickly aboard. It was only after he’d set off that it occurred to him that there were blank spaces on the page he’d signed where the English could insert anything they wished. But it was too late now to do anything about it.

  Travelling with my grandfather were Nazim Gandour, a Hungarian Jew, and an Arab. At the Miye Miye camp in Saïda, my grandfather and the Hungarian got off and Nazim Gandour and the Arab were driven on to Beirut. After four days at Miye Miye, Dakak and the Hungarian were driven to Beirut, where they caught a train to Aleppo. There, the two prisoners were placed on board the Taurus Express and accompanied by a soldier and an English sergeant to the border town of Meydan Ekbez. The sergeant observed to Dakak that Turkey had tough laws and pitiless justice. Dakak replied: ‘I am prepared to appear not only before Turkish justice but before any court of justice.’ It was the last trick the English had up their sleeve, my grandfather wrote; had I shown the smallest sign of fear about returning to Turkey, the sergeant would have been convinced of my guilt and would have returned me to the British. This was, after all, his assigned role; and the Hungarian Jew played his part very well, too.

  My grandfather’s testimony ended as follows:

  I was a prisoner for exactly three and a half years. During my detention not a single cigarette, a single handkerchief or a single piastre were granted me. I was forced to buy everything with my own money, and other valuable possessions were taken from me and stolen. An innocent man, I was unjustly imprisoned. By systematic and unceasing torture, by repeated poisonings in small doses and by the failure to treat to my heart condition, I suffered physical and psychological injury. I was made to suffer by means that contravene the laws of humanity, by methods incompatible with the dignity of mankind. It is worth pointing out that during my entire period of detention only twice did an English commanding officer meet me and only once a French commander, and then but briefly. What most enraged me were the insinuations directed at making me believe that my own government had delivered me to the English. They also wanted me to believe that the reach of the Intelligence Service knew no bounds, and that even in Turkey I was within its grasp.

  As a Turkish citizen, it is my duty to inform you of the foregoing.

  Accurate or not, the testimony finished on a note of relative coherence and sang-froid, and even the somewhat absurd complaint about the handkerchieflessness of his captivity sounded like a beginning of a return to fastidious form. Most importantly, my grandfather’s grievances came to a point, albeit an unusual one. The testimony was not, as I’d initially suspected, a statement of a claim for compensation. It was simply a notice, addressed to the Turkish authorities, of grievous wrongs committed on a Turkish citizen by ‘the English’ and of loss and injury suffered thereby.

  But what was the Turkish government supposed to do about this? Take up the matter with the British on
a diplomatic level? Pay compensation for torts it did not commit? Either course seemed very improbable. The more I thought about it, the more puzzled I became by the function of this document and the precise nature of my grandfather’s relations with the Turkish state, to whom the testimony was presumably addressed. As I re-read the final paragraph, one sentence stood out: ‘What most enraged me were the insinuations directed at making me believe that my own government had delivered me to the English.’ I did not understand the relevance of this strange remark, or why my grandfather had chosen to end his testimony with it.

  On 3 February 1942, around the time my grandfather was making his fateful visa application to the British consulate in Mersin, Sir Patrick Coghill, the SIME agent based in Adana, visited Beirut. The baronet learned, to his ‘stupefaction and horror,’ that he had been appointed head of the British Security Mission in Syria. The BSM had been founded by Arthur Giles, the head of CID Palestine Police, and had accompanied the invasion force into Vichy-controlled Syria in the summer of 1941 with a view to assuming the counter-espionage activities of the Vichy Sûreté. In the event, the Sûreté records were destroyed before the British could get their hands on them. Coghill noted that, at the time, the loss of the records ‘was a bitter disappointment – but looking back I wonder whether we were not better off without them. As practically all the French agents and informers were Lebanese Christians, all their reports were hopelessly biased and distorted – yet if we had taken them over we would certainly have believed them and relied on them.’ At any rate, it soon became apparent that the Axis had no significant espionage capability in Beirut or elsewhere in the region. Little trouble was experienced from its agents, which, Coghill speculated, was perhaps due to the large number of ‘suspects and known pro-Axis sympathizers’ held in ‘internment camps for Enemy Aliens and Agents and Suspects’.