The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel

This reaction started with the government of Kemal Ataturk, whose modern secular regime had assumed power in Turkey in 1923. Each time these have either quietly died, or been abandoned after clamorous criticism by various elements in Turkey. Several attempts at making a movie of the book have been made over the years, the most serious one in the '30s by MGM. It was published in 1933, 18 years after those events. According to Wiki, it was this novel, which Werfel is said to have researched in depth, which revealed the events upon which it is based to the world beyond Turkey. Based on the Armenian genocide that occurred in Turkey during World War I.

I remember that it was a fascinating, though horrifying, story, a real page-turner. Magnificent.'-The New York Times Book Review 'A novel full of the breath, the flesh and blood and bone and spirit of life.'-Saturday Review a story which must rouse the emotions of all human beings.' 'Musa Dagh gives us a lasting sense of participation in a stirring episode of history. It also continues to be today what the New York Times deemed it in 1933-'a true and thrilling novel. A passionate warning against the dangers of racism and scapegoating, and prefiguring the ethnic horrors of World War II, this important novel from the early 1930s remains the only significant treatment, in fiction or nonfiction, of the first genocide in the twentieth century's long series of inhumanities.

Unable to deny his birthright or his people, one man, Gabriel Bagradian-born an Armenian, educated in Paris, married to a Frenchwoman, and an officer doing his duty as a Turkish subject in the Ottoman army-will strive to resist death at the hands of his blood enemy by leading 5,000 Armenian villagers to the top of Musa Dagh, 'the mountain of Moses.' There, for forty days, in the face of almost certain death, they will suffer the siege of a Turkish army hell-bent on genocide. The Great War is raging through Europe, and in the ancient, mountainous lands southwest of the Caspian Sea the Turks have begun systematically to exterminate their Christian subjects. This stirring, poignant novel, based on real historical events that made of actual people true heroes, unfolds the tragedy that befell the Armenian people in the dark year of 1915.

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel