Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1938, Blaðsíða 313

KAREN JEPPE
303
During my stay in Syria I had an opportunity of watching
at close quarters her great and beneficial activity, I learnt to
admire her clear reasoning, her administrative talent as well as
the perseverance, skill and energy with which she directed the
big undertaking. She was physically weak and often had to keep
to her bed. I sometimes saw her sitting in her bed with big folios
before her giving directions about a young Armenian woman
who had just escaped and sought refuge with her, or about an
Armenian family struck by disease, death, unemployment etc.
It is wonderful to think that she, a single woman, managed
to build villages in the desert and make Arabs and Armenians
live together in peace and friendship.”
Dr. Natanael Beskow, president of the Swedish society which
helped Karen Jeppe to found the first village, writes: “Karen
Jeppe was one of the very greatest personalities I ever met.
Equally great in love, will-power and intellect. — Who has now
the fate of the Armenian nation at heart with such strength, and
who can be its champion before the world in the same way?
Lepsius, Nansen, Karen Jeppe — all the three great ones are
gone.”
Most touching are the testimonies from the Armenians them-
selves: Her foster-son Misak Melkonian writes: “Our adored
Mother, our leader in everything is no more among us. We have
nobody now to whom we can confide our sorrows, to whom we
can turn for comfort. We feel abandoned. We will try to become
worthy of being called her children.”
Another of her “sons” writes: “My Mother died when I was
thirteen. I became a slave among the Arabs and lived eight years
partly as a shepherd, partly as a camel driver. Then unexpectedly
I one day met a merciful human being. You, dear Mother, opened
your home for me. You became my second mother. — In the
goodness of your heart you taught me work by which I can pro-
vide for myself. You taught me and my comrades to understand
and speak our mother-tongue, and you have brought us back
to the church of our lost fatherland. Your home became our
refuge, there we struck root, there we built our future. — Our
hearts are your mausoleum. Our tears shall water the flowers
on your grave. May the earth rest lightly on you.”
Another calls her: Our “famous leader, guardian-angel and
liberator”, and says “This Danish woman has lived like a genuine
Armenian in exile. Till her last breath she thought of the orphans,