ABSTRACT
The utilization of enforced conscriptions of labor battalions was a favorite device of the Young Turks, and one that was revived in 1941 when thousands of Greek, Armenian, and Jewish minorities were marched off into central Asia Minor. Elias Venezis, conscripted into the slave labor battalions at the age of eighteen, remained a slave without any rights and even without any official recognition of his existence for fourteen months. As is the case with a number of twentieth-century Greek authors, Venezis was shaped by the wars and ethnic politics that absorbed the Balkans and Turkey and by the dire ethnic consequences that these wars had for the local and regional inhabitants. The Balkan wars, which constituted an unmitigated disaster for the Ottoman Empire, resulted in the flight of thousands of Balkan Muslims to what was left of the Ottoman Empire, eastern Thrace, and different parts of Asia Minor.
