Joining a crowded roster of recent productions focusing on the Holocaust, Here There Are Blueberries is a new play about a real-life photo album that belonged to an SS officer that helped run Auschwitz.
A finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize in drama (the award eventually went to Primary Trust by Eboni Booth), the 90-minute play comes courtesy of acclaimed playwright and director Moises Kaufman and is currently playing at the New York Theatre Workshop.
Back in 2007, an album filled with Nazi-era photos reached the desk of an archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
As the museum’s staff eventually uncovered, the collection of 116 black-and-white images depicting German officers partaking in mundane activities (on vacation, visiting a coal mine, at dinner) was sent over by a former American Army officer that had moved to Frankfurt in 1945, after the war had ended. He himself had found the 31-page album decades earlier inside of a closet of the abandoned apartment that he took over at the time.
Here There Are Blueberries explores both the origins of the photos and what they say about the very people who carried out the Holocaust.
“We’re trying to understand something profound about the people in the photographs,” Kaufman said to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I always felt if we did our job correctly, the play would speak to many moments in history, because the play basically deals with this idea that there’s a continuum between culpability, complicity and complacency.”
Specifically dissecting the evil that average humans are capable of doing, the play very obviously seeks to explain to the audience that the events leading to the Holocaust were not necessarily carried out by folks that look different from the rest of society.
“The Nazis were not monsters — they were normal people who did monstrous things,” Kaufman said to the outlet. “And if you can keep that in your brain, as uncomfortable as that is, then you have to ask yourself the question: What would I do in that situation?”
That outlook directly, and perhaps inevitably, leads to the current world order following the October 7 attack on Israeli civilians. By many compared to the situation before the Holocaust—when student protests kicked off overall antisemitic legislation across Europe—the present state of affairs imbues Here There Are Blueberries with added resonance. In a way, the photo album at the center of the production could very much be filled with photos from today.
Here There Are Blueberries runs through June 30. You can buy tickets right here.
