From the Armenian Genocide to the Warsaw Ghetto

A crowded hotel lobby in Breslau in late 1932. People waited there to see “the man of the hour,” Adolf Hitler. Hitler was touring Germany in his final bid for power. One of the spectators in the Breslau Hotel lobby was Franz Werfel. Werfel was disconcerted by seeing Hitler in person. When asked by his wife what his first personal impression of the Nazi leader had been, Werfel had reluctantly admitted, “Unfortunately, not so bad.” And this only made his current project all the more urgent: to warn Germany against Hitler.

Werfel was a German writer, born in Prague to a Jewish family. His most successful novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, is a literary monument to the Armenians and their fate in the Armenian Genocide that took place during World War I. It follows the fate of Armenian communities in southern Turkey who fled to the high mountains around Moses Mountain (Musa Dagh), from where they fought the advancing Ottoman army. They knew the fate that awaited them in the Ottoman Empire: genocide. They held out for 40 days (in Werfel’s version; in reality it was 53 days) and were eventually rescued by French and British warships, just as ammunition and food supplies were running out, and were then evacuated to Port Said, Egypt. This lengthy novel, often published in two volumes, is a story of murder, desolation, and suffering, but it is also one of hope.

Continue reading "From the Armenian Genocide to the Warsaw Ghetto" at...