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The Forty Days Of Musa DaghThe Forty Days of Musa Dagh is a 1933 novel by Austrian-Jewish author Franz Werfel based around an event that supposively took place on Musa Mountain in 1915 during the Armenian Genocide in Turkey. The book was first published as Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh in German in 1933. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh achieved great international success and has been credited with awakening the world to the evidence of the persecution of the Armenians. Werfel also wrote prophetically about the consequences of Nazi anti-Semitism, and The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was one of the books banned in Nazi Germany. Although written as a novel, the historical background content of the book has generally been accepted as fact, rather than the fiction inspired by fact that it actually is. In the 30s, Turkey pressurized the United States State department to prevent MGM Studios to produce a film based on the novel. As William Albig writes: In terms of the present capital organization and system of distribution the foreign market is very important to the American industry. The good will of foreign exhibitors and publics is often sought by changing the content of films, deleting offensive sections. It is reported that production ... of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was halted, in Turkey's interest. (Public Opinion by William Albig; McGraw-Hill, 1939) Later Austrian author and documentary filmmaker Professor Erich Feigl (author of A Myth of Terror: Armenian Extremism) has claimed that the book is based on "fake and false documents" and "incorrect evidence". According to this, Werfel has written the book using the version of events told by Aram Andonian and used documents (or, rather, the photographs of documents) provided by Andonian, but Edgar Hilsenrath in his work: Das Marchen vom letzten Gedanken, has severely criticized Feigl work, accusing it to be a highly revisionist publication and being abound of misleading details. Events of Musa Mountain Five months after receiving the expulsion order, on September 22nd 1915, most of the Armenians in this region, who were to be sent in the desert which would have ultimately meant a death sentence, went to Musa Mountain. The Ottoman army force in that region was not enough to oppose and overcome the five thousand people fortified in such a mountain. Whether there was a strong engagement of forces is hence unclear. Author of a book about the Ottoman fronts during World War I (Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War), Edward J. Erickson, has written that there was strong fighting for forty days in Musa Mountain, but the book itself has been criticized heavily by the Armenian genocide specialist Vahakn N. Dadrian. A native of the only Armenian village in Turkey (indeed the only one outside Armenia; Vakıflı, a village very close to Musa Mountain, see the figure on right), Avedis Demirci says, "There was no fighting. We went to the mountain, we stayed there for forty days, then left with the ship" (Translations accuracy limited). After spending forty days at Musa Mountain, the Armenians got onto two French ships that they had contacted. The side of Musa Mountain close to sea is very steep, and, adding to the difficultys, the ships could not approach the land and thus it was necessary to construct boats to reach them. The process of getting on the ships was difficult and painful. These ships then took the Armenians, who were already tired and starved, to a camp in Port Said in Egypt, after a long journey. Musa Dagh often has been compared with the resistances in the Jewish ghettos during the Second World War, one of those, the ghetto of Bialystok has found itself in the same situation when on February 1943, Mordecai Tannenbaum, an inmate of the Vilna Ghetto was sent with others to organize Bialystok's resistance. The record of one of the meetings organizing the revolt, suggest that Musa was often used in the Ghettos as a reference of successful resistances: Only one thing remains for us: to organize collective resistance in the ghetto, at any cost; to consider the ghetto our Musa Dagh , to write a proud chapter of Jewish Bialystok and our movement into history. (Source: Anthology of Holocaust Literature by Mordecai Bernstein, Adah B. Fogel, Jacob Glatstein, Israel Knox, Samuel Margoshes; Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969) Forty Days of Musa Dagh, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, The
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