In 1946, an American counterintelligence officer was billeted in Frankfurt, where he found an album of over one hundred photographs.  The photographs depict Nazi officers administrating Auschwitz in the final months before its liberation.  We see them at work, such as at the opening of a military hospital, and we see them at play: in particular, relaxing at the Solahütte, a vacation lodge overlooking a river just twenty miles from the death camp’s barracks.  The album appears to have been collected by Karl-Friedrich Höcker, the adjutant to Richard Baer, the final commandant of Auschwitz, and it forces us to consider the humanity of those who perpetrated the crimes of the Holocaust.

Here There Are Blueberries, written by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, dramatizes the receipt of the album by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007.  It is the sort of docudrama in which each actor plays several different characters and the action encompasses half the globe.  Key players include the unnamed counterintelligence officer who wants his gift to remain anonymous (Grant James Varjas); the middle-aged German man who recognizes his grandfather in several of the photographs (Jonathan Raviv); and Rebecca Erbelding (Elizabeth Stahlmann), the archivist who facilitated the donation and spends much of the play lecturing on its significance.  The title comes from a caption for one of the photographs, which shows Höcker distributing bowls of blueberries on the deck of the Solahütte to a group of Helferinnen, the young women and girls who served as auxiliaries in the death camp.  Simple pleasures; just out of frame, the machinery of mass extermination.

Here There Are Blueberries raises questions about the nature of violence, our relationship to history, and our responsibility to its lessons in the present.  Unfortunately, the play suffers from fatal timing.  It debuts one year after Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest, a film about the personal life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant who was both preceded and succeeded by Baer.  Glazer’s groundbreaking use of Big Brother-style cameras, natural lighting, and low affect illustrated with unrivaled brilliance the very lives captured in the Höcker album.  By comparison, the docudrama of Here There Are Blueberries has the emotional weight of a PBS documentary.

Here There Are Blueberries runs through June 30th at New York Theatre Workshop.  79 E. 4th Street  New York, NY.  1 hour 30 minutes.  No intermission. Photograph by Matthew Murphy.