When Jewish fighters in Nazi-built ghettos were looking for inspiration to resist deportation to the death camps, they turned to a fact-based novel about the Armenian genocide,
The Times of Israel reports.
Written by Prague-born Franz Werfel, ‘The Forty Days of Musa Dagh’ was tailor-made for the plight of aspiring resisters. The novel, published in 1933, fictionalized the siege of Musa Dagh - Turkish for ‘Mount Moses’ - where 250 Armenian fighters held off Ottoman-Turkish forces for nearly two months in 1915.
Since then, Turkey’s government has denied a genocide took place during World War I. This week, United States President Joe Biden officially recognized the murder of up to 1,500,000 Armenians by Ottoman-Turkish forces as a genocide. Israel has continued to stop short of recognition.
The author of the article says that although Armenian fighters held out at Musa Dagh for 53 days, Werfel made the siege last 40 days to resonate with the Old Testament. The German-language novel brought the Armenian genocide to the attention of millions of people around the world, in turn helping to raise significant funds for the refugees.
In the Warsaw ghetto, 'The Forty Days of Musa Dagh' was the most popular book in circulation. When Jewish resisters decided to fight back in the Bialystok ghetto, they spoke of the ghetto’s “Musa Dagh” moment at the planning meeting.
Under the cloak of the first global war, the Ottoman military carried out numerous massacres of Armenians beginning in 1915. In addition to open-air slaughters, thousands of Armenians were placed on boats that were sunk in the Black Sea.
Decades after the massacres, for ghetto-imprisoned Jews, the Armenian atrocities resonated with accounts coming from Jewish communities in eastern Europe. As the novel was devoured in dozens of ghettos, thousands of Jews determined to take matters into their own hands when the time was right.
In the Warsaw ghetto, 'The Forty Days of Musa Dagh' was the most popular book in circulation. When Jewish resisters decided to fight back in the Bialystok ghetto, they spoke of the ghetto’s 'Musa Dagh' moment at the planning meeting.
