25 images depicting the heroic resistance of Musa Dagh have been lately discovered thanks to the efforts of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute (AGMI).
These photos were taken in September 1915 by an officer of the French fleet, said the director of AGMI Hayk Demoyan in a Facebook post. The photos depict the evacuation of the civilians to the French military vessels, as well as other scenes.
The photographs will become open to the public in April 2018.
4 thoughts on “25 New Photos of the Battle of Musa Dagh 1915”
Franz Viktor Werfel (1890–1945)
was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet whose career spanned World War I, the Interwar period, and World War II.
He is primarily known as the author of
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
(1933, English: translated 1934 & 2012),
a novel based on events that took place during the Armenian Genocide of 1915, and The Song of Bernadette (1941), a novel about the life and visions of the French Catholic saint Bernadette Soubirous, which was made into a Hollywood film of the same name.
Born in Prague (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Werfel was the first of three children of a wealthy Jewish manufacturer of gloves and leather goods, Rudolf Werfel. His mother, Albine Kussi was the daughter of a mill owner.
A journey in 1930 to the Middle East and meeting starving refugees inspired his novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh which drew world attention to the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Ottoman government. Werfel lectured on this subject across Germany. The Nazi newspaper Das Schwarze Corps denounced him as a propagandist of “alleged Turkish horrors perpetrated against the Armenians.” The same newspaper, suggesting a link between the Armenian and the later Jewish genocide, condemned “America’s Armenian Jews for promoting in the USA. The sale of Werfel’s book. “Werfel was forced to leave the Prussian Academy of the Arts in 1933. His books were burned by the Nazis. Werfel left Austria after the Anschluss in 1938 and went to France, where they lived in a fishing village near Marseille…. Memorial to Franz Werfel by Ohan Petrosian in Schiller Park in Vienna. The granite pillar carries the inscription: “In gratitude and respect. The Armenian people”. In 1995 Armenia produced a stamp written under, Franz Werfel and a Hero of Musa Dagh.
The recent film “Promise” of 2016 based on the above true story of Musa Dagh. directed by Terry George (b.1952) and starring Oscar Isaac (b.1979), Charlotte Le Bon (b.1986), and Christian Bale (b.1974) showing Armenians sufferings and brave fightings. Many photos documented the factual story. Some who were lucky to live after the tragedy of Musa Dagh settled and build the town Anjar in Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, which was an empty land.