In the summer of 1915, the Armenians of six villages on the Mediterranean coast received the same order as Armenians across the Ottoman Empire. Leave your homes and join a death march into the desert. They knew what that order meant. They said no.

At least 4,000 men, women and children gathered what food, livestock and old rifles they had and climbed Musa Dagh, the “Mountain of Moses,” above the sea. They dug trenches, built barricades, and waited. The Ottoman army came for them. Thousands of soldiers attacked the mountain again and again. The villagers fought them off from the rocks and the pine forest. Their homes in the valley below were burned. They held out for 53 days.

By September, the food was nearly gone. According to survivors, the villagers sewed white sheets into banners, one with a large red cross, and hung them on the cliffs facing the sea, hoping a passing ship would see them. One did. The French cruiser Guichen spotted them. A small French fleet came in to the coast, and over 4,000 people were carried off the mountain to safety in Port Said, Egypt.

In 1933, the Austrian Jewish writer Franz Werfel turned their story into a novel, Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh or  The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. It was published the year Hitler came to power. The Nazis banned it and burned it. But during the Holocaust, inside the Jewish ghettos of Poland and Lithuania, copies were passed from hand to hand.  In 1943, the underground in the Białystok Ghetto made its choice to stand and fight with these words: “The only thing left is to see our ghetto as Musa Dagh.”

Today, one small Armenian village still survives near the mountain in Turkey, Vakıflı, home to some of the descendants of the families who climbed it in 1915.