We must not forget.  We have to tell the story of the holocaust so that the world will know what happened.  But the paradox is that, in order to tell the story we must find ways to speak about an unspeakable horror against humanity. The statistics of the holocaust are incredible.  The attempt to erase European Jewry by the Nazis was largely a success.  The destruction of a people on this scale was unprecedented and while Genocides continue today, the scale achieved in the 1940’s has not been repeated.

Charlotte Delbo willed herself to survive, in part because she promised to dedicate her life, if she returned, to giving witness to the atrocities she experienced in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps between 1943 and 1945. The rest of her life she struggled not only to carry the words, but to find the best words to tell about truths that none of us who were not there could possible understand. Besides, Who Will Carry The Word?, her works translated into English, include Auschwitz and After and Days and Memory.  In these works, Delbo’s obsession with the word and finding the right words to speak the unspeakable is clear.  The results are works of finely crafted poetry that attempt to define her Auschwitz experience from many angles.  While Charlotte Delbo is clearly a hero who survived the unsurvivable, she makes it clear in her work that the story is not about a hero or her singular experience.  It is about those who were denied a voice by the industry of killing that was a major part of the Nazi’s national policy during World War II.

In deciding to stage this play, we realize that we are taking on a moral and ethical duty to tell the world about unspeakable events.  The twenty women telling this story tonight on this stage understand the importance of that moral and ethical commitment to Delbo’s play. They must not only carry the weight of Delbo’s provocative words, they must also take on the responsibility of providing voice to the over six million Jews, Homosexuals, Gypsies, disabled, political dissidents and innocents murdered by the Nazi’s in the 1940’s.