//Ed. note: For the next six months, Eyüb Sabri Bey
would call the Zeitoun-Heliopolis prison camp home,
from late March to October 1919.//
Prison Camp at Zeitoun-Heliopolis
There were just two English soldiers at the Zeitoun
station and no means
of transport or porters for our belongings. The soldiers firmly advised
us to pick up our
stuff and walk. We complied, of course,
but Hüseyin
Cemil Bey lagged behind. His
load was heavier than mine and he
wasn’t very strong anyway, so I carried some
of his baggage. It took
about half an
hour to trudge to the camp so it was one o’clock at night
when we arrived. An English soldier met us and brought us inside
the
wire-fenced area, where there were quite a few large buildings but, in
the
darkness, we couldn’t figure out what they were. Nevertheless, we
found them to be
intimidating.
The English soldier stopped in front of one of the
buildings, unlocked
the door and whistling a tune, but without saying a word,
ushered us
inside. We looked at each
other and sensed that this was a bad place.
The soldier pushed us into the darkness of the building’s interior and
left, closing the door behind us. We
heard soft moaning and realized
that it was our poor friend Sedat Bey, whom we
had lost track of for
seven or eight hours.
It turned out that he had found the English
headquarters near the Cairo
station, been brought here and imprisoned
after all his personal items were
taken from him, including his clothes
and money.
Hüseyin Cemil Bey had half a candle so we lit it
right away. Sedat Bey’s
outfit and
condition were very odd. On his head was
a small cap the size
of a cup and he wore only an undershirt and underpants,
lying on a bare
concrete floor under a blanket.
Seeing this, we knew that, sadly, the
same treatment was in store for
us. Sedat Bey explained at length the
torturous time he had been through and from the telling it was clear
that his
treatment had been inhumane and terrorizing.
We didn’t sleep at all that night. As dawn broke, we were hustled outside.
Turkish soldiers from all the other buildings
began to appear outside, as
well, along with a large number of English
sergeants and soldiers. The
Turkish
soldiers said that they were prisoners within the wire fences and
had been put
here after trying to escape. As for the
Englishmen, they
had stolen blankets and clothes from the warehouse and were
caught
trying to sell them. So this was
nothing other than a prison. It was
roll-
call and break time so we roamed around for a bit before they put us
back
into the buildings. Two hours later, we
were brought outside
again and taken to an English major.
This fellow was the camp commandant, aged about 60
and somewhat
portly. We were all
stripped naked and Hoca Abdullah Efendi objected,
saying “It is against Islam
to be naked in public like this. At
least give
us some kind of a cover.” In
other words, he wanted something with
which to cover his private areas, but
despite his insistence, this request
was denied. Such requests made to the English were always
a waste
of time and energy because immoral and irreligious words and deeds
were
their idea of fun. Another example of
English ‘breeding’ and
‘civilization’!
A bit later they doused us with chalky, cold water –
a bath of sorts.
All our money and
clothes were taken from us and, like Sedat Bey, we
were each given underwear, a
shirt, a pair of sandals for our feet and a
worn out ‘fez’ for our heads, along
with two blankets. Out there in the
middle of the desert, surrounded by thick stone walls, with the doors
and
windows shut we suffered from the heat, barely able to breathe.
The next day, Besim Bey sacrificed a gold
watch he had been able to
hide during all the searches to bribe an English
sergeant into opening
a window for us.
We remained in that dark prison in the unbearable
heat of Heliopolis (Zeitoun)
for a full 15 days.
Entry Into the Wire Fenced Area (Prison Camp) and
Our Registration
23 March 1919
While in the prison we were each given a number,
which we attached
haphazardly on our left sides. My number was 70638. We were pleased
to have come into the wire
fenced area because up until that moment we
did not know what our fate would
be. By entering beyond the wire fence
we
were now among a crowd of prisoners, which comforted us somewhat.
We were also relatively free there in one of
the wooden buildings and
slept well that night.
There were thousands of Arabs, Kurds, Albanians
and Circassians from
every province and district among the prisoners.
With us in the second building of the eleventh wire
fenced area
(Camp 11) were Faik Bey, a notable from Nablus, and the mayor of
Kisâriye
town in Haifa district, Bosnalı Ahmet Bey, both of whom had
arrived before us,
having been transferred from a civilian wire fenced
area. We chatted with these two fellows and were
glad to have company
like them. Later,
we encountered many from Antep, who were amazed
to see us there. They gave us their extra blankets and
clothes, being
sad to hear about the calamitous news we brought about Antep but glad
to see people from their
hometown, all the same. These prisoners
from
Antep had persevered in the Ottoman Army during the Great War and
told us stories of heroism on the battlefield.
At the Heliopolis facility there were camps for
civilians and seven camps
for Ottoman prisoners out of a total of 15 camps.
Between the camps was
a narrow sidewalk and within them were16 to 20 wooden
buildings. The
camps were surrounded by
two or three wire fences and watchtowers
every 15 paces. The capacity of each camp was between 1,500 and
3,000 prisoners. While we were at Heliopolis,
there were a little less than
30,000 prisoners there.
The civilian prisoners were from various places and
had been accused of
political crimes.
There were some Turks among them. Antebli Batbatzâde
Nuri Efendi, whom we had left at Şerbetçi Han in
Aleppo, was brought to
the civilian camp after we arrived at Heliopolis. Besides him in the
civilian camp were the
Antep merchant Mennanzâde Mustafa Efendi and
some of his friends. A few days before the English came to Antep,
he had
gone to Aleppo on business and was arrested there along with his friends
İmamzâde Mustafa Efendi, Hasan Ağa and Emin Ağa, and transported to
Egypt. Mustaf Mennân Efendi was one of Antep’s
influential and
intellectual youths and he gave many moneyless prisoners cash
assistance while in the camp. In fact,
he helped me on the night I
escaped, as did his friend Batbatzâde Nuri Efendi. They leapt over
two wire fences with incredible courage to throw money to me in the
rear of my camp. For the two of them to take such a risk to
help me
was remarkably brave and I am forever in their debt.
Among the civilian prisoners, were İsmail Hakkı Bey,
a civil service
official from Istanbul, quite a few scholars and poets from
Syria and
Palestine, and Ömer Baytar Efendi, the mayor of Yafa, who I had known
for some time. He was quite a brave
fellow, afraid of no one and proud of
his love for and attachment to the
Ottoman Empire. Also among the
civilian
prisoners were Akka Member and Fourth Army Inspector Esat
Şakir Efendi, along
with many notables from Jerusalem and Nablus.
Esat
Şakir Efendi was a 65-years-old member of the ‘ulema’ (Moslem
clergy)
and had been arrested because of his ties to the Turkish Army and
especially Cemal Paşa. He was severely
tortured and degraded by the
English.
For months, he was held in prison without his turban and his
clothes and paraded around stark naked.
Nevertheless, despite suffering these atrocities,
Esat Şakir Efendi
maintained his dignity and never indulged the English aims
and wishes.
He would shout out loud
“Turks are a race that doesn’t die and cannot
be killed. Because they are
Moslems. Islam is eternal, it lives and
so
do the Turks.” Among those brought
here from Palestine, there were
some poor fellows who went an hour or half an
hour away to meet the
English when they first arrived in Palestine and I’m
sorry to say that
they wound up suffering worse degradation and torture than
anyone else.
Seyfeddin Efendi, one of the members of the Nablus
Administrative
Council was imprisoned with us. He was a pessimist and forever
roundly
cursing the English, who put the civilians they brought to Egypt into a
separate camp here or sent them to Alexandria.
We were among the few
civilians put in with military prisoners. This was done to increase the
pressure on us,
although we weren’t obliged to do hard labor like the
soldiers were. We were, however, subject to all the other
restrictions
and treatment imposed on the soldiers. For example, with regard to
food, they gave
us no money to buy any and took whatever money we
had on us, making us live in
constant anxiety and deprivation.
The small amount of food they gave the soldier
prisoners was nearly
useless for nourishment. The English gave our soldier
prisoners 250
grams of bread per day and made them work till evening in the hot
sand on this amount alone. Sometimes,
along with the bread, prisoners
were each given seven dry and moldy dates and
an onion for two people
to share. If
there were no onions available, each prisoner received half
a turnip. The evening meal was a small plate of leeks
cooked in cotton
oil. The English took
great advantage of the leeks and dry beans.
This
leek meal continued until the end of August. Thanks to the water of
the sacred Nile River,
the leeks grew to a meter and a half and were
just about as thick and hard as
wood. Dry unsheathed beans and leeks
were cooked in a pot and given to the prisoners and, as everyone knows,
opposites don’t mix well together.
Because the leeks cook quickly but
not the beans so they remain raw when
served this way. Our prisoners
would
come back from hard labor hungry, only to have to face this
meal of uncooked
beans. By midnight some would be in
great pain and
be taken to the hospital, where they would die.
As of 1 August 1919, the English began to give all
the Ottoman prisoners
horse and donkey meat.
The soldiers tried to refuse this meat but
ultimately had to eat it
because the small amount of beans was not enough
to quell their hunger. The consequence, though, of eating this
smelly meat
in the baking heat of August in Egypt was dysentery and, for some,
a kind
of itching disease that the English doctors called “palağra”, which
resulted
in many deaths. For our
prisoners to have been kept in hunger in a country
like Egypt, possessing great
wealth and grandeur, and forced to eat putrid
horse and donkey meat, resulting
in deaths, is, in my opinion, one of the
most important matters to be
investigated, as a debt to those who lost their
lives this way.
