The Forty Days of Musa Dagh - Franz Werfel

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is a 1934 novel by Austrian-Jewish author Franz Werfel based around an event that took place on Musa Dagh in 1915 during the Armenian Genocide in Turkey. The book was first published as Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh in German in November of 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. The novel is a fictionalized account based on the real-life defense of Musa Dagh's Damlayik by Armenians who were facing systematic deportations and massacres put into effect by the Committee of Union and Progress central government.
Musa Dagh has often been compared to the resistance in the Jewish ghettos during the Second World War, one of those, the ghetto of Bialystok found itself in the same situation as Musa Dagh when in 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, suggests that the novel was often used in the Ghettos as a reference to successful resistance: “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” noted Tannenbaum. Copies of the book were said to have been "passed from hand to hand" among the ghetto's defenders who likened their situation to that of the Armenians'. According to extensive statistical records kept by Herman Kruk at the Vilna ghetto library, this book was the most popular among ghetto readership, as is recounted in memoirs by survivors who worked at the library.