Moisés Kaufman’s remarkable and haunting drama Here There Are Blueberries takes its title from a modest source: the caption in a 1940s photo album showing a group of young women enjoying bowls of blueberries together with their boss. The banality of the image becomes more complicated when you learn the context. These women, many just teenagers, were communications workers at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in the 1940s. And the album of 100-some similarly benign snapshots belonged to a Nazi officer, Karl Hoecker, a former bank clerk who became the administrative assistant to that notorious death camp’s head, Rudolf Höss.
Kaufman, who conceived and directed the show and co-wrote it with Amanda Gronich, forces us to confront some fundamental questions about human nature — how we are capable of great harm, how we compartmentalize our lives to mitigate our sense of responsibility (and guilt) for collective actions, and even how we cling to mementos of a past that is not always pretty or does not depict us in the most favorable light. The photo album that surfaces does not contain a single image of an Auschwitz prisoner, but their absence makes the photos all the more chilling. Hiding the obvious from view does not make it go away.
Here There Are Blueberries, a Pulitzer Prize finalist that played two years ago at Off Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop, is not your typical Holocaust story, nor does it follow the usual methods of documentary theater even as it pulls a good deal of its text (and visuals) from historical records. For one thing, the focus is not on the victims of Auschwitz but the perpetrators — a fact that challenges the curators and archivists at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial museum who receive the photo album from a U.S. Army veteran who discovered it in an abandoned German apartment post-liberation.
The show is an unlikely celebration of the work of museum archivists and researchers, the folks whom the Trump administration has taken to castigating for “woke” ideology at the Smithsonian and other public institutions. Here, we see a team of academics elevated to bookish versions of Sherlock Holmes or Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon, seeking to identify the people in the photos and better understand how much those individuals knew about the horrific work on the vast compound that employed them. Derek McLane’s versatile set design, with archivist desks that could double as religious altars, underscores the heroic nature of their quest, backed by David Lander’s epic lighting and David Benali’s projections of the photos from the album as well as other images from the period.
The researchers’ sleuthing provides a deep dive into the mindset of the people who facilitated the slaughter of millions of human lives at Auschwitz. In a shot of Hoecker flirtatiously posing with the young women on the communications team, a downstage screen is held up so that we can effectively zoom in on his hand and the wedding ring he wears. There are scenes of Christmas trees being decorated in December 1944, just weeks before the Soviets liberated the camp. Did they not realize the Nazi effort was failing, or consider sending their children out of harm’s way?
More shockingly, we see a celebratory photo featuring scores of uniformed officers, with Höss and infamous “Angel of Death” Auschwitz architect Josef Mengele standing up front, as a man plays an accordion before them. (Brandon Flynn re-creates the moment by miming the playing of the instrument, unconvincingly.) As we contemplate what might have prompted the festive gathering, documentary clues pinpoint the image to July 1944 — when the Nazis completed the extermination of 350,000 Jews forcibly removed from Hungary that spring.
Kaufman and Gronich help us to understand the mentality of these Nazi flunkies without letting them off the hook. We hear from Holocaust historian Stefan Hördler (played by Michelle Beck): “The women think, ‘Oh we just make phone calls, we don’t handle prisoners.’ The SS doctors think, ‘We just select if they’re fit or unfit for work.’ Even the guy who takes people into the gas chamber says, ‘I didn’t select them.’ And everyone thinks, ‘If I didn’t do it, someone else would have.’ No one feels responsible.” It’s an alarmingly ingenious means of shirking individual responsibility — and it presages how easily ordinary, supposedly upright people can get caught up in situations whose deadly-serious meaning they may only comprehend in retrospect, if at all.
The show bears similarities to Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest, which depicted the life of Höss and his family as well as the other Nazi officers at Auschwitz as they went about their daily lives while blithely blocking out the horrors unfolding just over the back wall of their gardens. (Some of the physical details in the film seem to be lifted directly from the photos in Hoecker’s album.)
Delia Cunningham leads the superlative eight-person cast, each of whom shifts among multiple roles throughout the 100-minute performance. They present the material with practiced understatement that implicates us all, an effect that’s amplified by color-blind casting that allows Black actors Michelle Beck and Mentego Glover as well as Filipino-American Conrad Ricamora to play individuals who are often white. Here There Are Blueberries gains its power from its even-keeled approach, eschewing the maudlin for a professorial restraint. As the researchers gather new information and facts accumulate like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the devastating bigger picture comes into focus. We can no longer look away, or hold history at arm’s length. When it comes to atrocities taking place in our view, this moving and timely drama suggests, we are all culpable. ★★★★★
HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES
Barrymore Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through January 10 for $49 to $371