An anonymous American World War II veteran contacted the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in December 2006 about an album containing photographs of SS officers at Auschwitz. They weren’t snapshots of the Nazis committing atrocities, but eating blueberries, playing music, and enjoying their days off. There was a disturbing ordinariness to them — they weren’t monsters. The scenes between committing murder looked mundane. That is the basis of “Here There Are Blueberries,” a new play by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, on stage at the Wallis in Beverly Hills until March 30.
The album was found in an abandoned Frankfurt apartment in 1946 by a U.S. Army officer serving in the Counter Intelligence Corps. He kept it for decades before donating it anonymously to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in January 2007. The photo album became news in September 2007 when The New York Timesreported on it in an article titled, “In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Frolic.” The album is believed to have been made by Karl Höcker, an SS officer at Auschwitz, It had 116 photographs showing Nazis seemingly taking a break. USHMM says the photos were taken between May 1944 and January 1945 — “the period during which the gas chambers were operating at maximum efficiency.”
The images are a jarring look at how those responsible for the Holocaust viewed themselves — not as killers, but as ordinary people enjoying their free time. Excerpts can be viewed on the USHMM website.
“The [Nazi] owner of the album had put this thing together as a scrapbook of his time there,” Gronich told the Journal. “So we’re literally looking through the eyes of the perpetrators. It’s their version of the story. It’s how they perceived what Auschwitz was. Through these pictures, we see not only a glimpse of how the perpetrators viewed their day-to-day lives there, but also how they envision what the world might look like if they were the victors.”
“The [Nazi] owner of the album had put this thing together as a scrapbook of his time there. … So we’re literally looking through the eyes of the perpetrators. It’s their version of the story. It’s how they perceived what Auschwitz was.” – Amanda Gronich
Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Project began developing “Here There Are Blueberries” through workshops in 2016, with Gronich co-writing.
“I thought at first, this is impossible,” Gronich said. “We can’t make a play about an album of photographs. And even if we could make a play about an album of photographs, we can’t make a play about that album of photographs. But again, I had never worked on anything about World War II, and I had this personal connection. So I sort of took a deep breath and I said, well, if we can figure this out, it would really be such an extraordinary journey for an audience.”
The play premiered in 2022 in San Diego. Its 2024 run at New York Theatre Workshop was the highest-grossing production in the theatre’s history. It was also a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The story follows the museum archivists who first examined the album and the historical detective work that followed after it made international headlines.
“A businessman in Hessen, Germany recognized a family member,” Gronich said. “And so he embarks on this journey working with the museum to track down people who have relatives in the photographs. And what does that mean? … When we interviewed these descendants of people in the photographs, I (was) so intrigued. They don’t have the luxury of distance. They are descendants of Nazis. And how are they grappling with this continuum of complacency, complicity, and culpability? For them, looking at these pictures, when we interviewed them, it wasn’t, ‘Oh, what does this picture say to you?’ It was, ‘Oh, and that’s your father and that’s your grandfather.’ In some ways, these pictures in the Höcker album are family photos for them so that they’re grappling with history in a very immediate way… again, where is the luxury of distance? And if you don’t have that, you really are forced to reckon with your own family and your own role in history. And that’s really something that I think we all need to do. All of us need to be reckoning with history in a very personal and immediate way.”
The play blends live actors with projected images from the album.
“The actors interact with the images almost as though they were scene partners,” Gronich said. “It’s really a detective story.”
What makes “Here There Are Blueberries” so unsettling is that it refuses to treat Nazis as monsters. Monsters are easy to dismiss. But these men and women were human. They ate blueberries, played music, and laughed — then returned to their roles in mass murder. That contradiction is what makes the play so haunting.
“To prevent this from happening again, we need to understand how it happened,” Gronich said. “We are not exonerating, we are not apologizing for, we are not explaining it away. We are simply saying, human beings did this. And for us to examine how human beings do this, it helps us to understand the recipe. If we can understand the recipe for the making of a Nazi, we hopefully can make sure we never make that recipe again.”
The play draws from the field of “perpetrator studies,” which examines the mindset and behaviors of those who commit atrocities. “Perpetrator studies is sort of a new — I mean, not new, but it is being investigated more fully now, in the moment in history that we find ourselves,” Gronich said. “And we have to be willing to look at how ordinary people were capable of doing this.”
Gronich, whose past work includes “The Laramie Project,” describes audience reactions as unlike anything she has seen before.
“In all my years in theater, I have never seen audiences so wrapped,” Gronich said. “You can hear a pin drop.”
The Los Angeles debut of “Here There Are Blueberries” runs through March 30 at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills. Tickets are available at TheWallis.org
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