A journey in 1930 to the Middle East and encountering 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 U.S.A. the sale of Werfel 's book . " Werfel was forced to leave the Prussian Academy of 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 . Visitors to their home at this time included Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann . After the German invasion and occupation of France during World War II , and the deportation of French Jews to the Nazi concentration camps , Werfel had to flee again . With the assistance of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee in Marseille , he and his wife narrowly escaped the Nazi regime , finding shelter for five weeks in the pilgrimage town of Lourdes . He also received much help and kindness from the Catholic orders that staffed the shrine . He vowed to write about the experience and , safe in America , he published '' The Song of Bernadette '' in 1941 . Fry organized a secret crossing over the Pyrenees on foot . They went to Madrid and then Lisbon where they boarded a ship for New York , arriving 13 October 1940 . Werfel and his family settled in Los Angeles , where they met other German and Austrian emigrants , such as Mann , Reinhardt , and Erich Wolfgang Korngold . In southern California , Werfel wrote his final play , '' Jacobowsky and the Colonel '' ( '' Jacobowsky und der Oberst '' ) which was made into the 1958 film '' Me and the Colonel '' starring Danny Kaye ; Giselher Klebe 's opera '' Jacobowsky und der Oberst '' ( 1965 ) is also based on this play . Before his death , he completed the first draft of his last novel '' Star of the Unborn '' ( '' Stern der Ungeborenen '' ) , which was published posthumously in 1946
Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide
Franz Werfel