Armenian Genocide "Musa Dagh" Resistance workshop

The Genocide Education Project (GenocideEducation.org) presented a workshop on the resistance of Musa Dagh during the Armenian Genocide, at the San Francisco Holocaust Center's Day of Learning for high school students, March, 2013. The workshop included a presentation by Garine Panossian, a middle school teacher and granddaughter of a Musa Dagh resistance fighter. This video contains excerpts of Panossian's presentation.
Musa Dagh (meaning "Moses Mountain") was the site of resistance by the Armenians during the Armenian Genocide, which took the lives of approximately 1,500,000 Armenians, half of the Armenian population living in its historic homeland. The population of the six villages of Musa Dagh (on the Mediterranean Sea south of the coastal town of modern-day Iskenderun) had been given an official order from the Turkish government whereby they would be expelled from their homes and marched into the Syrian desert. As Turkish forces converged on the town, the populace, aware of the impending danger, chose instead to retreat up the mountain and to defy the evacuation order. With a few hundred rifles and the entire store of provisions from their villages, the people repeatedly thwarted Turkish assaults for fifty-three days, from July 21 to September 12, 1915. French warships sighted the survivors and transported them to safety in Port Said, Egypt. British and French ships successfully helped evacuate more than 4,000 Musa Daghians.
The story inspired the Prague-born Austrian writer, Franz Werfel, to write a novelized version of the events, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. Published in 1933, the book became an instant bestseller, but with the rise of Hitler, Werfel, himself a Jew, fled Vienna that same year. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was eventually translated into eighteen languages, while Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the Hollywood film company, announced plans for the production of a movie version of the novel. The Turkish ambassador's protestations to the Department of State resulted in the intervention of the United States government in the matter. In response to a veiled threat to ban American-made films from Turkey, MGM studios permanently shelved plans to produce the movie.
In Eastern Europe many Jews read Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh as a warning about their fate. During the Holocaust years, copies of the novel are reported to have been circulated as a source of inspiration and a call to arms in some of the ghettos to which the Nazis confined the Jews. (from Armenian National Institiute)
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