A black-and-white photograph of young German girls smiling, captioned in 1944 with “Here there are blueberries,” is projected onto the stage of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. The chilling addendum, unspoken until now, is that just beyond these carefree scenes lay Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp where mass murder was unfolding. This image is central to At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre’s new play “Here There Are Blueberries,” which opened Monday night on Broadway. The show examines the jarring normality of Nazi family life mere feet from genocide.
Written by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, the play is a docu-drama based on a 2007 donation to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The gift was an album of rare photographs taken by Karl Höcker, an SS officer stationed at Auschwitz. Unlike typical images of the camp’s horrors, these pictures show Nazis and their families at leisure, relaxing on lawns, playing games, posing by a river. The album was clearly assembled with care, a personal attempt to preserve memories of happier moments amid atrocity.
On stage, the set is stark: desks with lamps and magnifying glasses. Screens display the photos while actors shift roles between museum archivists, Nazi descendants, and Auschwitz survivors, using transcripts of post-war testimony. Delia Cunningham plays Rebecca Erbelding, the museum archivist who first receives the album and sparks debate over whether such images should be displayed at all.
“Isn’t the museum’s mantra to focus on the victims, not the perpetrators?” her colleague Judy Cohen, played by Kathleen Chalfant, asks. Rebecca counters, “Isn’t it our job to present unvarnished history and allow people to wrestle with it and come to their own conclusions?” The photos challenge viewers to confront the uncomfortable reality that those who committed heinous acts also had ordinary lives.
When the album becomes public, Tilman Taube, played by Conrad Ricamora, recognizes his grandfather in several images. He agrees to help researchers despite the social stigma often faced by descendants of Nazis. Taube’s character wrestles with his memories and family legacy, adding a layer of complexity to the narrative.
The play poses difficult questions: Who exactly was Karl Höcker? Why were the SS officers seen enjoying themselves weeks before the camp’s closure, even as Soviet forces liberated Majdanek? What did these men and their families know about the horrors nearby?
Kaufman and Gronich, known for “The Laramie Project,” take a clinical approach, keeping emotional distance to better illuminate the material. Cunningham’s Rebecca embodies journalistic determination and empathy, embodying the tension between professional duty and moral reckoning. The cast also includes Michael Cerveris, Montego Glover, Michelle Beck, Brandon Flynn, and Scott Barrow, giving weight to the ensemble’s exploration of memory and complicity.
A poignant moment arrives near the end, when Lili Jacob, a Holocaust survivor, recounts finding her own set of photographs. These images capture the day she arrived at Auschwitz, at the exact time Höcker’s family was captured in their idyllic snapshots. Jacob’s testimony brings the victims’ voices directly into the story, confronting the audience with the human cost behind the smiling faces.
“Here There Are Blueberries” runs without intermission for 90 minutes at 243 W. 47th Street. The play refuses easy answers, instead asking audiences to reckon with a painful past through the lens of family photographs and archival research. The quiet moments, girls eating blueberries, boys in toy cars, become unbearable when placed against the backdrop of extermination.
According to NY POST.
