A Tale of Two Uprisings: From the Warsaw Ghetto to Musa Dagh
By Khatchig Mouradian
two_uprisings_warsaw_ghetto_musa_dagh
December 19, 2007
On the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, students in
the U.S. joined an ADL delegation to participate in the March of the
Living. In Poland, the students visited the Warsaw Ghetto. ADL
national director Abraham Foxman said, "This trip will teach young
people, both Jews and non-Jews, the importance of remembering the
Holocaust at a time when survivors are dying and individuals still
continue to deny it happened."
Today, very few survivors of another genocide’the destruction of the
Armenians’are still alive. And individuals continue to deny it
happened.
In a time when the memory of genocide victims’from the Armenian
genocide to the Holocaust’is under attack by genocide deniers, I’d
like to invite readers of this post’including, hopefully, Foxman
himself’to learn about the deep connections between the Jewish heroes
of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the Armenian heroes of Musa
Dagh. Also central to this story is Franz Werfel, a brilliant Jewish
novelist who helped forge these connections.
***
Franz Werfel, an Austrian-Jewish writer, became an international
literary figure with his 1933 novel, Die vierzig Tage des Musa
Dagh. The book was originally written in German and published a year
later in English under the title The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. It tells
the story of the heroic self-defense of the Armenians of Musa Dagh
during the Armenian genocide of 1915. Werfel decided to write the
novel after witnessing the plight of Armenian refugee children in
Damascus in 1929. Little did he know that his novel would not only
become a classic and an inspiration for generations of Armenians, but
would also serve as a model of survival and resistance for his own
people during the Holocaust.
After the 1938 Anschluss, Werfel left Austria to take refuge in
France. Soon, with the occupation of France by the Nazis, he narrowly
escaped, fleeing to the U.S. He thus avoided the concentration camps,
where a generation of Jewish leaders and youth found solace,
inspiration and a call to uprising in his novel The Forty Days of Musa
Dagh.
According to Professor Yair Auron,
"Momentous moral questions arise from Werfel’s book. It prominently
expresses humanistic values, to which the members of the [Jewish]
youth movements were sensitive, as well as the moral uncertainties by
which they were beset. The story of the defense of Musa Dagh became,
indeed, a source of inspiration, an example for the underground
members to learn, a model to imitate.
"They equated their fate with that of the Armenians. In both cases,
murderous evil empires conspired to uproot entire communities, to
bring about their total physical extinction. In both cases, resistance
embodied the concept of death and national honor on the one hand, and
the chance of being saved as individuals and as a nation on the
other."
Auron notes that "reading the book strengthens the spirit of the
members of the youth movements, the future fighters, as Mordechai
Tannenbaum and other underground leaders suggested."
Werfel’s novel had a great influence on Antek (Yitzhak Zuckerman), the
deputy commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the author of A
Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. When
talking about the Holocaust and what books to read on the issue, Antek
would say that "the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising could not be understood
without reading The Forty days of Musa Dagh."
In an introduction to the French edition of the book, Holocaust
survivor and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize Elie Wiesel says,
"The novel is a masterpiece. … This Armenian community became very
close to me. Written before the coming of Hitler, this novel seems to
foretell the future. How did Franz Werfel know the vocabulary and the
mechanism of the Holocaust before the Holocaust’artistic intuition or
historic memory?"
Wiesel continues, "The novel is precisely about this memory. The
besieged Armenians feared not death but being forgotten…"
***
I hope Abraham Foxman will choose to follow in the footsteps of Franz
Werfel and Elie Wiesel, and not allow the resistance fighters of Musa
Dagh to be forgotten.