Kricorian intended her novel in part to be an act of political criticism as the FTP-MOI were banded as "terrorists" by Vichy France and as "Judeo-Bolshevik terrorists" by Nazi Germany, and are today remembered as heroic Resistance fighters, which led her to see parallels with modern politics. Kricorian further intended another parallel with the way that Armenian resistance groups under the Ottoman empire were banded as "terrorists" by the Ottoman state, which was used as excuse for anti-Armenian policies. Kricorian also examined the controversial subject of collaboration as she also incorporated into her novel the story of the Armenian Legion of the Wehrmacht that was recruited from Soviet Armenian POWs to fight for the Third Reich, a story that she found to be very bizarre, through she noted that many of the Armenian Red Army POWs who joined the Armenian Legion did so as a way to avoid staving to death in German POW camps [between June 1941–March 1942, about 2 million Soviet POWs staved to death in German POW camps]. However, she found it inspiring how the singer Charles Aznavour and other Franco-Armenians encouraged the soldiers of the Armenian Legion to desert, and offered to shelter them. The Wehrmacht had a strict policy that desertion was to be punished with either death or service in the dreaded penal battalions, which was tantamount to a death service; and likewise encouraging someone to desert from the Wehrmacht was also punishable by death. Kricorian wrote in a 2012 essay: "Charles Aznavour, 19 at the time, was responsible for the nighttime task of dumping the deserters' boots and uniforms into the sewers of Paris."
