Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1938, Page 303

KAREN JEPPE
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her life::'): Through the lectures of the Danish author Aage Meyer
Benedictsen, who had been travelling in the Near East, she heard
about the sufferings of the Armenian nation, the massacres in the
nineties and the many orphans who were left behind. She writes:
“What touched me most deeply was the misery of the children.
I saw before me crowds of orphans, in need of everything, first
and last of love. That sight never left me.”
In 1903 she was sent out by the newly founded “Danish
Friends of Armenia” to Urfa, in Mesopotamia, to an orphanage
founded by Dr. Lepsius, the famous German champion of Ar-
menia and the Armenians.
Later she wrote: “I went out to care for some orphans whose
need had touched my heart. But when I got out there, I met a
nation.------I learnt to love the Armenian people. I cried my-
self to sleep the night when I realised how dreadful it must be
for this people with their strong national feeling not to have any
fatherland. Everywhere they are strangers, tolerated or perse-
cuted, but not a spot do they have which they can call their own.
As the years go by, the ties that bound me to them grow
stronger and stronger. Their sufferings are my sufferings, their
hopes and disappointments are mine. It is a thorny road, but it
is for me the only one.”
She called the Armenians “the indomitable people who never
give up, never despair. Time after time their homes are pulled
down, everything they have cultivated is destroyed, and always
they begin afresh. Time after time they are betrayed by those
they trusted most. But very soon they throw off despondency
and pursue new aims. That is why I can never get tired of them
or find the situation impossible.”
From 1903—1918 Karen Jeppe worked at Urfa. The first
ten years or more were peaceful; the Armenians, and she with
them, were usually on good terms with the Turkish population.
She also made friends with the Kurds and Arabs whom she met
at her country house outside of Urfa.
Then came the War, which brought new persecutions and
misery worse than ever before to the Armenians. During the de-
portations, Karen Jeppe often witnessed scenes of indescribable
Karen Jeppe’s Life by the Danish authoress Ingeborg Maria Sick
(Gyldendal, Copenhagen) has been translated into German (Steinkopf,
Stuttgart).
20*