Delbo's 'Who Will Carry the World?': Holocaust Experience and Memory

This essay delves into Charlotte Delbo's autobiographical drama, 'Who Will Carry the World?', which portrays the harrowing experiences of women in the Auschwitz concentration camp. It explores the play's historical and socio-political context, highlighting the characters' struggles to survive and bear witness to the atrocities they faced. The analysis examines the play's themes of trauma, memory, and the conflict between experience and acceptance, set against the backdrop of the Holocaust. Delbo's work is presented as a powerful testament to the resilience of the human spirit and a reminder of the importance of remembering the horrors of the past, challenging claims about the death of poetry after the Holocaust and emphasizing the play's profound intellectual and emotional impact.

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Who Will Carry the World?
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Introduction
Charlotte Delbo provocatively described her horrifying memory of Auschwitz in the
autobiographical drama named "Who will carry the world?". Characters like Francoise, Claire or
Yvonne of this lesser-known play from the performance world give us a heart-wrenching story
from the darkest period of the human history. The play specifically captures the first few months
of the concentration camp when the violence and destruction were most severe. 181 people
among Delbo’s companions were murdered out of 230 people.
The background and Reason
As the war was about to end Delbo was released from the camp. She published her
trilogy "Auschwitz and after" is 1965. The play "Who will carry the world" was written in
French around 1970- 1971 and later was translated into English in 1982.
Delbo depicted the central theme of the play in the title "Who will carry the world?" The
fighters want at least one of them to be alive so that they could shout out the atrocities they had
experienced in the camp to the world. At the same time, they are struggling to absorb what was
happening to them and other victims. They are in doubt that even if they tell their stories to the
world, will the world believe them as it is unimaginable. The conflict has been depicted with
such believability that the reader could never raise the question (Fisher). The victims thought that
the incidents were too horrifying to be part of any dream, but on the other hand, they failed to
accept such degree of abuse of humanity in the real world. The play strongly expresses that the
terrors and trauma of the concentration camp should not be forgotten

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Historical context
Between the year 1933 and 1945, the concentration camp was a significant part of Nazi
regime's history in Germany. In 1933 Nazis came to power and within few weeks the
Sturmbteilungen, Schutzstaffel, the police and authorities started establishing camps to imprison
political rebels and Jews (Campbell). The concentration camps were the places where people
were confined under harsh conditions.
“Who will carry the world” highlights the history of the Holocaust from a different
perspective. This tells us the stories of such characters who were not victims of Nazis because of
their religious identity. The characters were not Jews. They were convicted because of the
political crime they committed. They committed acts of rebellion, so they had to enter the
concentration camp. This play is significant because it documents a history that tells its readers
that there were thousands of victims in Auschwitz who were non-Jews (Kritzman). In Who will
carry the world, Francois, Clair and their other companions were French nationalists. Throughout
the play, the characters were bound by the common thread of patriotism for their country.
Socio-Political Context
The story is a historical, political tale of humanity and horror. The playwright Charlotte
Delbo was a non-Jew, but as she was working for the French resistance, she was imprisoned in
the camp by Nazis (Ellen). She survived the Holocaust and documented her experience in this
play. The women fighters struggle to survive the pain and horror in the unimaginable
circumstances. The characters leave and fight with the fear that no one might survive the torture.
There should be at least one person among them who would survive the circumstances and carry
the world about what they experienced here.

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The set and story
The play is set in the women barracks of the concentration camp where the roll call, cruel
guards and gunshots or screams were part of daily life. In the initial part of the play, Francois is
struggling to stay alive and wants to commit suicide, but Claire is convincing her to stay alive as
one must have to live for carrying forward the words. The characters expressed their shock and
horror through the word (Chiappone-Lucchesi and Greenspan). The word "unimaginable" has
repeatedly been uttered by them. They could not imagine anything as inhuman as terrible as this
could exist in reality. This much destruction of humanity was not even possible in their
imagination, but that was happening, in reality, they could not believe it. The greatest fear that
the characters expressed was the conflict between experience and acceptance. The women from
the play had to go through countless numbers of resistances at each step of their daily life in
Auschwitz. Despair and sickness were their companions for every day. Francoise talks about
“the last free act”. This was the desperate decision of committing suicide by throwing oneself on
the electric wire fences that were surrounding Auschwitz (López-Muñoz and Cuerda-Galindo).
The failed to accept such horror, even though that was happening in real life.
Cultural Context
A question related to poetry’s existence emerged after the Holocaust in the world of art.
Many claimed that poetry died with the victims of Holocaust. Delbo's play can be considered as
an important tool against the claim. She did not write poetry, but the language, syntax and feel of
the play are significantly poetic (Thatcher). The writer reminds us that we owe a debt to the
suffered souls of the holocaust. Delbo forms a question regarding the definition of history. She
claimed what she wrote was true, but she was not sure whether they are historical truth or not
(Delbo). Every barrack has a different reality, and the survivors had different stories to tell.

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Conclusion
There was only a blurred line in Auschwitz between life and death. Extraordinary
heroism and stamina were required to live in a state where being alive were challenging. The
horror can be found on every line. The life within the isolated world of Nazi camp was nothing
but a nightmare. The ugly, infection and death are surrounding the characters all the time. There
is no ethics or morality here; the characters are living corps fighting to survive just a few more
days. Only one of the fighters could not continue the survival struggle and surrendered to the
sadness. The experience of the Holocaust days reflected in the play as a strong intellectual and
emotional recitation with the hope to reach its readers beyond its political, historical and social
boundaries.

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Reference
Campbell, Bruce. The SA generals and the rise of Nazism. University Press of Kentucky, 2015.
Chiappone-Lucchesi, Magali, and Arthur Greenspan. "Qui rapportera ces paroles?: Charlotte
Delbo's Theater as Witness." Women in French Studies 2016.1 (2016): 43-55.
Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and after. Yale University Press, 2014.
Ellen, Graham. Locating and Reading Trauma Ethically in Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and
After. Diss. 2015.
Fisher, Amanda Stuart. "Imagining Theatre in Auschwitz: Performance, Solidarity and Survival
in the Works of Charlotte Delbo." Performing (for) Survival. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016. 78-
99.
Kritzman, Lawrence D., ed. Auschwitz and after: race, culture, and" the Jewish question" in
France. Routledge, 2014.
López-Muñoz, Francisco, and Esther Cuerda-Galindo. "Suicide in inmates in Nazis and Soviet
concentration camps: historical overview and critique." Frontiers in psychiatry 7 (2016).
Thatcher, Nicole. "Charlotte Delbo: Transmission of a Poetical and Theatrical Vision of Her
Concentrationary Experience." Women in French Studies 2016.1 (2016): 10-22.