The Camera Is on You
Patricia Keeney*
Here There Are Blueberries by Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich. Directed by Moises Kaufman. Produced by the Tectonic Theatre Project and the New York Theatre Workshop. Scenic design by Derek Lane. Costume design by Dede Ayite. Lighting design by David Lander. Sound design by Bobby McElver. Projection design by David Bengali. Cast: Scott Barrow, Nemuna Ceesay, Kathleen Chalfant, Noah Keyishian, Jonathan Raviv, Erika Rose, Anne Shafer, Elizabeth Stahlmann, Charlie Thurston and Grant James Varjas. New York Premiere, April 17, 2024.
The camera is on you as you take your seat. Always watching, it un-nerves you.
Cameras are tricky. They are shapeshifters. There for a moment and then gone. What happened before the photo was snapped? After? Who took it? What does it reveal? What is it hiding?
Cameras.
A camera.
The driving force behind an extraordinary new American play called Here There Are Blueberries, a drama rooted in the Holocaust. We thought we had heard all the stories possible. But here is one more. Another original.
In development since 2018, Blueberries premiered in 2022 at the La Jolla Playhouse in California and later played an extended sold-out run off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop where I saw it June 8, 2024. Initially devised by a group of actors under the aegis of the Tectonic Theatre Project, it is now credited to the writing duo of Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich. Bravo to them all.

Produced under Kaufman’s masterful direction, the play yokes meticulous research and horrendous event with scrupulously honed elements of deeply affecting theatre. Pulsing with understated power, Here There Are Blueberries is rooted in the evocative force of a series of curiously disturbing photographic images taken in and around the Auschwitz concentration camp, images found by an American soldier in a Nazi officer’s photo album after the war. The album—which contained more than a hundred never-before-seen photos of Nazi officers on break, enjoying the numerous services of a spa built for them just down the road from the death camp itself—was ultimately offered to an American Holocaust museum.

In the play, museum archivist, Rebecca and her colleagues begin to unravel the story behind the photographs that so agitate the actors. Of Auschwitz, at leisure, moments of fun and pleasure, officers and secretaries dancing, singing and eating much coveted foods while the gas chambers belch out their black clouds.
And if that story proved real, would it be morally right for the museum to publicize it? Nazis at play? If added to the collection, how would these new evidence be taken by families of Holocaust victims? Would such visual revelations actually contribute to Holocaust denial?
We watch in fascination as the images unfurl, moving us backward in time, the actual photos functioning as characters. Scene partners for the actors.
Rebecca’s questions punctuate the sharp fraught speech of her museum team. Who ran the camp? Who made the album? Why was it not destroyed when the allies arrived?
We see Rudolf Höss sharp and fraught in the frame. We see Josef Mengele. We see them all in living black and white. Smiling. Laughing.

We learn with the museum staff that the album was put together by one Karl Höcker, a bank clerk whose life roared into overdrive when he was drafted into the camp’s upper echelons. His private memory book from Auschwitz. Höcker was typical of many who enjoyed elevation from their otherwise unremarkable pre-war existence. This was Höcker’s contribution to the fatherland, his good time memory of national service. Before everything came crashing down.
One by one, the museum’s staff react with bite-sized scraps of information, puzzlement and disbelief. Each packing a punch behind the banal drift of days revealed in the photos. Blueberries is a constantly moving narrative. There are many vices telling this story. There are many stories. Knowing, historically, what came next, you never know as you watch and listen what’s coming next. You never know which way this version will go.
Dramatic tension is palpable throughout; the staging and performances impeccable. Doubling and tripling roles, the actors introduce us to Germans they meet today: descendants of those who ran the camp. What do they think?
The grandson of an SS doctor recognizes his long dead relative’s face, tells us that those who deny reality and say nothing simply “transfer this trauma to the next generation.”
The grandson of Höss himself is interviewed. He worries that because he was violent as a young man, he may have been somehow tainted. “But,” he says, “if I believe that it’s in my blood, I am believing what the Nazis believed. So no . . . nothing is inside me. I am who I am . . . It’s my best revenge.”
One is reminded of the recent film, Zone of Interest (2023), based on the Martin Amis novel. It, too, details the comfortable family life of Höss which happened so blithely and blindly just outside the confines of the camp.
One of the most revealing photos—and the locus of the play’s title—depicts a line of young women, secretaries mostly, at the spa consuming handfuls of highly prized blueberries to the accompaniment of an accordian. Relaxed and amazed, the women sit laughing on a balcony rail overlooking the river. “Here there are blueberries” is simply someone’s delighted observation. Smiling Nazi officers look on.

Later, we see the girls in swirling summer dresses dancing. The job of these Helferinnen (female help) was simply to document those arriving at Auschwitz.
So, the question becomes did these teenage girls know, these recorders of numbers and names, that the designation of special treatment as opposed to worker meant the gas chamber. Their tedious clerical task decided who would live and who would die. With such division of small labours, mass killing was accomplished.
Rebecca aligns herself with the puritanical shock that such young women could be so casually sucked into the war machinery. Until she realizes that they were raised on Nazi propaganda, each one working for the new Germany, ultimately mating and marrying to produce the best children for the fatherland.
It was the photo of the Helferrinen, the female helpers eating blueberries at the Auschwitz spa that plunged writer-director Moises Kaufman into this project. His own father being a Holocaust survivor, Kaufman did not think he would ever be involved in creating a play on the topic, thought that everything had already been said.
Another photo is studied: a yuletide party at the spa, happy faces raised in patriotic song, an accordian jovially chugging along in chorus. This, even as the allies move closer.
Postwar trials offer more identifications and more answers. We learn details about Karl Höcker (1911–2000), the owner of the album. After the war, he tried to fade into a quiet life in Germany, but he was subsequently identified and put on trial in 1960 for his role in running the camps. Claiming that as an administrator he was just following orders and had never personally hurt anyone, he was sentenced to five years in prison.
Stunning in its New York incarnation, Here There Are Blueberries is theatre at its most compelling. Eminently do-able, it should tour widely, especially in those cities directly touched by the idiosyncracies—as well as the horrors—of war.
Representing the human side of Nazi perpetrators, whom we typically characterize as monsters, these photographs, so effectively dramatized, underscore the fragility of our own humanity.

*Patricia Keeney is an award-winning Canadian literary and theatre critic as well as a widely published and translated poet and novelist. Her most recent novel is One Man Dancing (Inanna) based on the history of Uganda’s legendary Abafumi theatre company. Her current poetry books include First Woman (Inanna) and Orpheus in Our World (NeoPoiesis) a collection of poems and contemporary dialogues based on the earliest Greek hymns. Her next novel, Emptiness and Angels is due to be published in 2025. Keeney is a longtime professor of Literature, Humanities and Creative Writing at Toronto’s York University. Website: wapitiwords.ca.
Copyright © 2024 Patricia Keeney
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #30, Dec. 2024
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
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