Since then, the Turkish government has denied that the genocide was positioned in World War I. This week, U. S. President Joe Biden officially declared that the massacre of 1,500,000 Armenians through Turkish Ottoman forces was genocide, which Israel continued to prevent before it was recognized.
Although Armenian fighters clung to Musa Dagh for 53 days, Werfel made the 40-day siege to resonate with the Old Testament. The German novel has caught the attention of millions of people around the world about the Armenian genocide, helping to raise a significant budget for refugees.
“Being Armenian is impossible,” according to an old Armenian adage included through Werfel in “Musa Dagh”.
Six years after the novel was published, Nazi Germany began to conquer Europe. Almost instantly, copies of “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” spread like gunpowder among young adults, some of which were discovered in cases similar to those found through Armenians. the last war.
Under the flag of World War I, the Ottoman army carried out massacres of Armenians from 1915 on. In addition to the outdoor massacres, thousands of Armenians were placed on ships sunk in the Black Sea.
Early filmed and photographed death marches involved Ottoman forces that took Armenian civilians into the Syrian Desert of Deir Zor. Elderly people and other sick people who may not have stayed up were shot. Thousands of others were led down the cliffs and the young men were kidnapped through hostile tribes. .
Decades after the massacres, for Jews imprisoned in the ghetto, Armenian atrocities resonated with stories of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. While the novel was devoured in dozens of ghettos, thousands of Jews took the subject into their own hands when the time came.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” was the most popular e-book in circulation. When the Jewish resistance to retaliation in the Bialystok ghetto, they spoke of the “Musa Dagh” moment of the ghetto at the plan-making meeting.
“There is only one thing left: to organize collective resistance in the ghetto at all costs; consider the ghetto as our “Musa Dagh”; write a proud bankruptcy of the Jewish Bialystok and our movement in history,” Mordejai wrote. Tannenbaum. ” If you read [Werfel’s book], don’t forget it for the rest of your life,” Tannenbaum said.
For Tannenbaum and other “Musa Dagh” fans, it is not difficult to perceive the ancient joy of Armenians. For centuries, Armenians practicing Christianity were persecuted through their “host country”, the Ottoman-Turkish Empire, and excluded from civilian and military service. .
When some Armenians fought for equivalent rights in the last 19th century, thousands of civilians were killed in response. Like the Jewish jolgorio in Europe, Armenians have long been regarded as a “fifth column” in the occasion of the war, which has the “justification” of the government for genocide.
In the Vilnius ghetto in Lithuania, “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” was the most popular e-book in circulation, the librarian Herman Kruk reported. Jewish resistance fighters who tried to flee the ghetto to register in partisan ensembles “passed the e-book from hand to hand,” according to reports.
Writing from her ghetto about the popularity of the novel, resistance fighter Haika Grosman wrote the Armenian bloodbath “in view of the global total reminded us of our fate. “
“Armenians were starved to death, shot, drowned, tortured to exhaustion,” Grosman wrote. “We have his destiny for ours, the indifference of the world to his destiny and the total abandonment of the deficient in the hands of a barbarian and tyrannical regime.
Across Eastern Europe, Jewish resistance fighters used the term “to organize a Musa Dagh. “Warsaw ghetto historian Emanuel Ringelblum wondered in the role, “What, will the world ask, do other people have a idea of Musa Dagh?”As far west as the Netherlands, accounts of Dutch “clandestineness” have highlighted the novel’s great popularity among Nazi-resistant people around the world.
Touchingly, Warsaw Ghetto orphanage director Janusz Korczak spoke to his staff about the e-book in 1941, adding a bankruptcy in which a pastor abandons his children to save himself. hide in the Aryan Warsaw, accompanying his young men to the Treblinka death camp.
As in warsaw’s Holocaust ghetto, the difficult situation of Armenians made headlines around the world in near real time. The New York Times, for example, published 145 articles about the 1915 massacre, and U. S. President Teddy Roosevelt called the Armenian genocide “the greatest war crime. “
Although it served as a corporal in the First World War of the Austro-Hungarian Army, Werfel learned even more about wartime persecution on an excursion to the Middle East in 1930. “Banality” of bureaucrats accused of committing genocide.
“The struggle of 5,000 other people in Musa Dagh fascinated me so much that I sought out the other Armenians by writing them and taking them into the world,” said Werfel, who continually reviewed his e-book until its publication, in a way of evoking the emergency. Nazi threat.
The Jews trapped in the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe were the only ones who were inspired by the “forty days of Musa Dagh. “
In pre-state Israel, Jewish leaders were actively preparing for the prospect of a German invasion. The defense plan called for the creation of a castle in Massada at the most sensitive point on Mount Carmel, where Jewish fighters could simply retreat for a “last minute. “struggle “opposite German forces.
Although the plan is widely remembered as the ‘Masada Plan’ or ‘Plan Carmel’, it was also called the ‘Musa Dagh Plan’. For months, dominance around Haifa provided weapons and materials to deal with a German siege, while fortifications were erected.
“[We will] turn Carmel into Musa Dagh of the Palestinian Jewish community,” said Meri Batz, one of the organizers of the plan that had read Werfel’s novel. “We put our religion on the strength of the “Jewish Musa Dagh” and we were determined to last at least 3 to 4 months,” Batz said.
However, the Ottoman-Turkish attack on Musa Dagh ended as Masada: French military ships controlled to evacuate 4,200 Armenians to Egypt. During the 53-day confrontation on the mountain and its foothills, 18 Armenian fighters were killed.
According to historians, parts of the novel were prophetic about the closeness of the Holocaust. For example, “concentration camps” are represented by forest smoke.
“The reader of this ordinary novel will find it difficult to know that the e-book was written before the Holocaust,” wrote historian Yair Auron, who criticizes the Israeli government’s refusal to recognize the Armenian genocide.
“In retrospect, the e-book looks almost like a draft of the facets of the Nazi Holocaust in which the Jews of Europe perished,” Auron wrote.
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