The memoirs of two refugee women During the last years of the Ottoman Empire, refugees and deportees were everywhere. People became ‘transottoman’ without ever having planned such a thing, crossing borders because state officials forced them to do so and/or this seemed the only possibility of survival. Usually without vocational or professional training, women found enforced mobility especially traumatic. However, some young females took on the challenge and in a few instances, produced narratives reflecting their efforts to make a living in an unfamiliar environment. The present paper deals with two such memoirs, the work of female mobile actors using whatever family support remained available and building successful lives, aided by good health and plenty of energy. Descended from Muslim notables of Macedonia, Belkıs Halim Vassaf (1904-98) experienced her family’s flight as a child in primary school. By the time of arrival in the Anatolian town of Akhisar, she had lost both parents, but with the help of her half-brother Zekerya (Sertel) between 1918 and 1921, she attended the teachers’ training school (Darülmuallimat) in Istanbul as a boarder. While very detailed, the narrative of Belkıs Halim Vassaf is at considerable remove from the events narrated. She spoke her memoirs on tape in old age, and the tapes do not seem to be publicly available. Therefore, it is hard to say to what extent later experiences colored Halim Vassaf’s memories, nor can we exactly pinpoint the considerable interventions of her son, the author Gündüz Vassaf. Other editors may have added further layers of comment. A woman despite her male pseudonym, Cahit Uçuk (1909-2004) had lived in and around Salonika. She did not experience the turmoil of the Balkan Wars directly, deriving her account from the reports of her grandmother and father, a young official in the late Ottoman Balkans. Especially the grandmother narrated her experience of humiliation, robbery, and physical aggression. While Uçuk’s memoir provides a lively account, as a historical source, it is difficult to utilize; for the author did not specify who shared which parts of the story with her at what time. Despite their drawbacks, these two books are instructive to the historian as they reflect female experiences of war and flight, otherwise rarely recorded. We can only ‘peel off’ layers of intervention as far as possible, and otherwise, take the texts as primary sources for the views current at the time of (probable) composition.