The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
Posted By shirley on February 5, 2010
I recently read a piece by Edward Minasian called “The Forty Years of Musa Dagh: The Film That Was Denied.”
It is a fascinating expose on what happened to the movie that was supposed to be made by “the mythical kingdom called Hollywood” – twice! Once in 1935 and again in 1982. Although the film was finally made in 1982, it was not a Hollywood hit as previously intended and played mostly to Armenian audiences.
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is a literary masterpiece published in 1933. The author, Franz Werfel, was on a trip to Damascus, Syria in 1929 with his future wife. The couple visited a carpet-weaving plant. During the tour, they came across emaciated children with “El Greco faces and enormous eyes.” Werfel inquired after the factory-owner as to “whose strange children are these?” The owner explained that they were children whose parents had been killed off by the Turks.
The Werfels were visibly shaken by the sight of these children. This set Werfel off on a journey to write his masterpiece. Werfel obtained the complete file on the Armenian massacres from the French Ministry in Paris. During his research he discovered the account of the Armenian villagers of the Musa Dagh region. Rather than submit to the Turkish directives to abandon their homes and join relocation convoys to the Syrian Desert, they had holed up atop the mountain Musa Dagh. After 55-days they were rescued by a French fleet and taken to sanctuary in Port Said, Egypt.
It is amazing to me that in this land of freedom we cherish, we can be so bullied into silence by powerful governments and political groups that even the willfulness of Hollywood stands bowed and meek. “Shame, shame” I can hear my grandfather saying.
Musa Dagh refugees at Port Said, Egypt
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