Rebecca Erbelding (Elizabeth Stahlmann) becomes obsessed with an album of photos showing SS men and women at Auschwitz.
Here There Are Blueberries, a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, explores the idea that a picture can speak a thousand words. The play has been created using “historical artifact, interviews conducted with real people, historical transcripts, and other primary sources.” Centered on an album of photos that was meant to be destroyed, the play asks whether the side of those who commit atrocities in history should also be shown.
Nemuna Ceesay and Scott Barrow play several roles including, here, librarians considering the ethical implications of the photo album.
In 2007, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum received a photo album from a retired American officer who was sent to Germany after the war to capture and prosecute Nazis. In Frankfurt he found a moldy, dog-eared album in a trash can. Now, years later, he is sure it has some historical significance. The lead archivist, Rebecca Erbelding (the earthy Elizabeth Stahlmann), and head curator Judy Cohen (the implacable Kathleen Chalfant) quickly determine that the album contains snapshots of Nazi SS members and their families living in Auschwitz. The album belonged to Karl Höcker, an administrator for Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant of the death camp (and the subject of the 2023 film Zone of Interest). Very few photos of Auschwitz exist, and no previous ones of SS members at the camp: The Nazis destroyed as much as they could. Rebecca confesses that the photo album becomes an obsession because “it’s very powerful to be able to see what we’re not supposed to see. And we were not supposed to see this.”
The photos range from one of Josef Mengele, a physician known as the “Angel of Death,” to shots of Solahütte, a lodge built by Jewish prisoners for officers and their families to relax. Several are of a group of young women, the Helferinnen (the communication corps), who are no more than teenagers as they lounge on deck chairs, prepare for an outing, and socialize. One shows them grouped together, sitting on a railing and holding up a bowl of blueberries. This photo, like all the others, is carefully inscribed in Höcker’s neat, bureaucratic handwriting: “Hier gibt es Blaubereen,” the German for the play’s title.
“The album contains snapshots of Nazi SS members and their families living in Auschwitz. ”
There is not a single photo of the victims or a hint of what lies beyond. The contrast of leisure (deck chairs, outings) and luxury (blueberries and probably cream) with the backdrop for the photos (gas chambers, barracks, disease, starvation) surfaces many ethical questions that, although there’s not a lot of action, create a dramatic arc. The stories behind the photos are brought to life by the excellent cast (Scott Barrow, Nemuna Ceesay, Jonathan Raviv, Erika Rose, Charlie Thurston and Grant James Varjas), who play a constellation of characters. Tilman Taube (Raviv) comes forward after reading an article about the album in the German magazine Der Spiegel. He is shocked to see his grandfather, Heinz Baumkötter, a physician during World War II, in some of the photos.
Another, Rainer Höss (Charlie Thurston), the grandson of Rudolf Höss, wonders how his grandparents, who lived in the house next to the camp and just a few steps from a gas chamber, claimed to know nothing. He says, “I try to imagine how every morning, my grandfather dressed in his uniform, and he kissed his kids, wished them a nice day, and went out of his house … to do his job.” He comes to feel that “everything I think I know about myself is a lie.”
Rebecca Erbelding (Stahlmann), the lead historian and archivist, pores over the rare photos of SS men and women at Auschwitz. Photographs by Matthew Murphy.
A simple set of desks (set design by Derek McLane) easily transform the space into the museum, where the tubal fluorescent lighting (David Lander) exaggerates its office-like environment and soft spotlights differentiate the scenes for individuals as they tell their stories. Ambient sounds (Bobby McElver) provide a powerful sense of action and time in the liminal space of our imagination as the story unfolds. The scraping metal of cattle car doors opening and closing make the horror of transporting people palpable even when these images aren’t shown.
A final photo of Höcker in front of a Christmas tree shows the warped collision of reality and illusion. Melita Maschmann (Erika Rose), who was head of Press at the camp (no women were convicted of war crimes), says, “It takes more than the belief in Germany’s mission to turn decent people into criminals. But this is precisely the terrible truth—that it did not take more than this.”
A coproduction of the New York Theatre Workshop (79 East 4th St.) and the Tectonic Theater Project, Here There Are Blueberries plays through June 30. evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; matinees are at 2 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, and there is an additional matinee at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, June 12. There will be no 7 p.m. performance on May 26 or June 16.
Playwrights: Moisés Kaufman & Amanda Gronich
Direction: Moisés Kaufman
Costume Design: Dede Ayite
Sound Design: Bobby McElver
Scenic Design: Derek McLane
Lighting Design: David Lander
Projection Design: David Bengali
