The 40 Days of Musa Dagh first English-language edition (1934) arrived on the Sunroom Desk as a treasured personal gift on Sunday. The very same day, speaking at the Glendale Library’s Genocide Commemoration symposium, USC history professor Wolf Gruner cited the book as evidence that knowledge of the Armenian Genocide was widespread in Nazi Germany.
First published in 1933, it was targeted by the Nazi regime for its book burning campaign. Gruner reported that it was republished in Austria in 1934 and later provided inspiration to WWII Jewish resistance leaders in the Warsaw Ghetto. The novel is based on the true story of an Armenian village’s resistance to and escape from Turkish forces during the genocide.
Side note: a main character in the book is a young preacher who organizes the town’s defense; his descendants now live in the Glendale area (more in an upcoming Bookshelf post).
Insights from the other two lecturers:
“Denial of the Armenian genocide is a political issue, it is not a historical issue. In Norway, there is no political will.” – Matthias Bjørnlund, Danish archival historian (speaking about the Scandinavian countries’ response to the genocide)
“The seizure of Armenian property, both personal and real, was enormous, and a great impetus for people to participate in denials…The very perpetrators of the genocide were charged with writing its history, so of course there was denial.” – Ugur Ümit Üngör, who has studied the ‘desk perpetrators’ of the Armenian Genocide, the bureaucracy and organization that made it possible
The auditorium was filled to capacity for the Sunday symposium, which highlighted the determined work of international scholars on the subject of genocide and Man’s Inhumanity to Man.
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