Theatre: “Here There Are Blueberries” written by Moises Kaufman

Photographs capture a moment in time—some are worth savoring, others trigger terrible memories. In “Here There are Blueberries,” Moises Kaufman’s chilling new play, it’s definitely the case of the latter.

Seventeen years in the making, “Blueberries” uses rear-projection photography and eight actors rotating through roles as current-day archivists and Nazi-era functionaries (and their descendants), to tell a story that seems too incredible to be true:

In the mid 2000s, an album of Nazi-era photographs arrived at the desk of the head archivist of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It was sent by an 87-year-old retired U.S. lieutenant colonel, who claims to have found the photos when he served in Germany after WW II. The album was labeled “Karl Hocker,” whom the museum knew to be the chief of staff to Rudolf Hoss, commandant of Auschwitz.

Hocker’s photos do not portray the victims of Auschwitz. Instead they depict junior administrators, cheerful teenaged telephone operators and stenographers, and other members of the support staff who made the camp run so “efficiently.”

When these support people did a “good job,” they were rewarded by their supervisors with days off at a rustic countryside retreat. Indeed, the play's title comes from the inscription on a photo of the young secretaries, cheerfully spooning blueberries.

When the museum posts the photos online in the 2000s, a German businessman sees them, recognizes his own grandfather, a camp physician, and contacts the museum. He subsequently reaches out to fellow Germans whose fathers and grandfathers are also pictured. Those who agree to speak with him absolve themselves of any crime and plead ignorance of what was going on at Auschwitz.

The play further reveals that after the war, the most of the death. amp’s chief perpetrators were eventually hunted down, tried and executed. The rest walked away scot-free, convincing themselves and others that they were minor functionaries and thus deserved no blame.

Kaufman, along with Amanda Gronich, wrote the narrative after reading a NYT article in 2007 about the donation of the album to the Holocaust Museum. It is an eloquent reminder that a simple set of photographs can hit harder than words ever will.

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