Since there is such a dwindling number, deaths of Holocaust survivors are news. On February 23, 2014, the BBC reported that Alice Herz-Sommer, the last Holocaust survivor, had died at 110. On September 5, 2023, David Wolnerman, the last Detroit Holocaust survivor was reported as having died at 96. On June 6, 2021, CNN reported that David Dushman, the last Auschwitz liberator, had died at 98 and noted that until he entered the concentration camp gates, he had no idea what he’d encounter.
Exactly when the actual last survivor dies – or has already died – may not be known, but when it occurs, there will be no living witness to the unforgettable circumstances. Or is there the potential for the circumstances to be forgotten? That possibility means that any record emerging to remind the world of the Holocaust – and the dire need for it never to occur again – is invaluable.
A new one – already seen at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2022 and the Washington D. C. Shakespeare Theatre Company, after a Miami workshop – has arrived in New York City. It’s Tectonic Theater Project’s Here There Are Blueberries, conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman, written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, and greatly enhanced by David Bengali’s chilling projections. Kaufman is known, of course, for hard-hitting stage documentaries since 2000, when he presented The Laramie Project.
In the latest entry and after a series of photographs showing Germans enjoying themselves at play in the 1930s and then increasingly depicting Nazi encroachment, attention switches to ten people industriously working at desks on a Derek McLane set with the upstage screen continuing to present substantiating information.
Scott Barrow, Nemuna Ceesay, Kathleen Chalfant, Noah Keyishian, Jonathan Raviv, Erika Rose, Anna Shafer, Elizabeth Stahlmann, Charlie Thurston, and Grant James Varjas portray archivists and historians at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. At times they also assume roles of participants in the ensuing Holocaust revelations.
Initially, Stahlmann steps forth as archivist Rebecca Erbelding to announce she’d received a letter offering an album of photographs taken at Auschwitz. Dubious at first, she suspects the sender, an 87-year-old retired U. S Lieutenant Colonel, is only guessing the photographs show Auschwitz. Furthermore, the album contains photographs of only military staff. There are none of inmates, which is the museum’s mandate.
About to dismiss the affair, she spots a smiling someone in one of the photographs whom she recognizes: Josef Mengele, known then and remembered now as the war’s “Angel of Death” and of whom there has never been proof he was at Auschwitz. She knows; she wrote an academic paper on him.
So, she shows the photograph to colleague Judy Cohen (Chalfant), who examines the photograph and notices another even “more important” figure: Rudolf Höss, who built Auschwitz and was responsible for its every deathly amenity.
At that moment. Erbelding and Cohen realize they are looking at an astonishing record of the Auschwitz custodians, their daily lives, their routines, their habits. Astonishingly, they’re offered the unexpected, and until then thought impossible, opportunity to examine life as experienced not by the incarcerated thousands but the overseeing cadre, often caught enjoying themselves in “their downtimes.”
Contacting the retired Lieutenant Colonel, they learn he found the album in a closet at an apartment he rented when assessing Auschwitz conditions just after the Second World War ended. Pressed by Erbelding, he donates it to the museum, where it was accepted despite museum resistance to take possession of objects not confined to representing what inmates suffered.
From then on Here There Were Blueberries is a mesmerizing series of (often damning) findings that have actors delivering speeches as first-person accounts. It should be noted that the Kaufman-Gronich script introduction stipulates that “this is not a verbatim play” and that “customary” dramatic liberties have been taken. Nonetheless, the effect never ceases to be convincing, the accumulating photographs carrying considerable weight.
For instance, they determine the album belonged to Karl Höcker, administrative assistant to Richard Baer, the Auschwitz commandant, at which point actor Barrow speaks as Höcker. More contributions follow, such as Tilman Taube, who recognizes his grandfather in a photo and devotes himself to locating others whose predecessors were also Nazis and want to confront a troubled family past.
Sequences are devoted to Hütte Soletat, a retreat not far from the death camp where soldiers doing, er, good work were rewarded with luxury breaks. Other vacationers, women known as Helferinnen – telephone, telegraph, radio operators for the SS – got to visit. There they delighted in delicacies like blueberries, thus the Kaufman-Gronich title.
Presented without an intermission – clearly, Kaufman wants no interruption of the mounting intensity – the documentary is an invaluable addition to Holocaust literature. It’s made even more so by the excellent ensemble, all conveying the Tectonic Theater Project’s gravity.
The even better news is that it joins other recent Holocaust remembrances. Last year Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, for which Here There Are Blueberries is a virtual companion piece, won film attention as it focused on the Rudolf Höss family’s contented home life. In addition, there’s the Tadeusz Slobodzianek Our Class, as translated by Norman Allen. In 2019, Maggie Smith appeared at London’s Bridge Theatre as Joseph Goebbels’ uninformed secretary in Christopher Hampton’s A German Life, yet to be produced stateside.
Fading Holocaust memories? Let’s be grateful there are those fiercely committed to saying, Not so fast.
Here There Are Blueberries opened May 13, 2023, at New York Theatre Workshop and runs through June 16. Tickets and information: nytw.org
