Twice a Stranger - Bruce Clark

Subtitled:  How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey.

An excellent account of this whole historical episode.  It gives the background and the historical information in detail, but not too much.  It also includes many personal reminiscences of the experience from older people on both sides of the divide, as well as acute observations from the author made during his travels in both countries.
The end result is a complex picture of a complex set of experiences which tends to counter the more absolute mythology around the expulsions and the events leading up to them. 

One interesting passage can be found on pp. 193 - 195, recounting the political moves of the CHP around the opposition that was critical of the government's corruption and inefficiency in dealing with the population exchange.  In the end, the leaders of the opposition were accused of being disloyal and imprisoned and eventually executed during the aftermath of the Kurdish uprising shortly after the population exchange.  The press was also so suppressed.  The ruling party even maintained they had aborted an assassination attempt on Atatürk   This is, of course, the identical playbook that Erdoğan has used - the Ergenkon case, as well as the whole Fetah Gülen story.  Various aspects of the Turkish managing of the population exchange make it clear that this collusion between the ruling party and the big business elite is built into the DNA of the Turkish Republic.  In a way, it is a continuation of the relationship between the Sultan and the non-Muslim elites of the late Ottoman Empire - a favoured business elite with special rapport with the government and which is allowed to enrich itself in exchange for money and favours...   As usual, nations have a very hard time changing their political DNA;  they just swap round the power brokers and the business elite groups.

Not Even My Name - Thea Halo

A moving account of  the life of Thea Halo's mother, a Pontic refugee from Turkey driven out in the 1920s.  The story is bookended by their modern day attempt to track down and revisit her mother's native village in the mountains on the Pontic shore.

An interesting read for several reasons:

The contrast between the political experience of a group like the Pontic Greeks in the early century, and the day to day experiences both at the time of Thea's mother's childhood and of their recent return to Turkey - both experiences feature Turks as important actors but it presents such a contrast of indifferent evil on one hand, and kindness and empathy on the other.  How does this happen?  What does this say about a society that it can show both of these attitudes, play both of these roles?  Is it something in human nature?  Is it something in the nature of society - us vs. them at times, us together at times?  Is it a comment on particular, personal vs. generic, theoretical experience of the Other?

What does it do to a dominant society when it has to work so hard to deny and cover up its past?  To concoct alternative false narratives and broadcast them far and wide?  To the point of looking foolish, ridiculous?  What does it do to the inner dynamic of the society itself?  Does it stunt the society's ability to reason, to come to grips with reality in other ways?  Does it leave the society vulnerable to oligarchy?  Evil?  Again, is it human nature or political man at the heart of this?  Turkey is not alone here - many societies live like this, including Canada, the US, Israel, Japan, Russia.  What does it mean to live a fiction so totally?

It is hard to imagine the state of Thea's mother when she arrives in the US.  It is hard to imagine the level of destitution she had been reduced to - essentially the loss of everything tangible and intangible.  A life teetering on the edge of invisibility, of nonexistence.  Loss of home, loss of all family, loss of all community, loss of name, loss of any material good save the clothes on her back. loss of mother tongue.  No sense of belonging anywhere or to anyone.  Loss of way of life, but replaced only by the experience of suffering - no knowledge of any life outside the old one.
Then picture so many of the immigrants to the US at that time, all coming from a similar level of habitual destitution or similar loss.  Surely that has some effect on the shaping of a society, its understanding and its values.   Surely this goes some way towards explaining the difference between the Old World and the New World in the early and middle 20th century.

Stories like this continue in the Middle East even today (and other parts of the world too) - Syria, Palestine, Iraq, eastern Turkey.  Still on the same bases - ethnic and religious difference, the vulnerability of minorities.  You can read some of these stories in the book recently posted, Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms.

Some references:

Smyrna 1922:  The Destruction of a City, M. Housepian - Tor Ref.

The Slaughterhouse Province, Leslie Davis - Tor Ref.

The Blight of Asia, George Horton ??

Ambassador Morgenthau's Story - Henry Mortenthau - Tor. Ref.