Given the Armenian Diaspora, many ethnic Armenians read the abridged English edition for years, which lacked many of the scenes of Armenian life. With these scenes restored in the revised and expanded edition of 2012, the novel's meaning to Armenians is all the more poignant, as Vartan Gregorian writes in the preface, ""The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" was meant as a memorial set against a new historical phenomenon that had been described as the murder of a nation, the extermination of a race, and the assassination of Armenia ... ". The novel, in its expanded form, has even more relevance as a document of genocide. "t is truly remarkable," continues Gregorian, "to consider how closely "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" foreshadows the cataclysm that would befall the Jews of Germany and Eastern Europe at the hands of the Nazis." As historian and scholar Yair Auron writes, "The reader of this extraordinary novel will find it difficult to believe that the book was written before the Holocaust."