History is rarely a silent monument of grand battles and stark villains. More often, it’s a photo album left in a drawer. When Tectonic Theater Project brought Here There Are Blueberries to Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, it didn't offer a comfortable historical distance. Instead, Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich crafted a documentary play that forces you to stare directly at the smiling, relaxed faces of men and women who processed mass murder by day and laughed over bowls of fruit by night.
If you think you know everything about how the Holocaust unfolded, this 90-minute production dismantles that illusion completely.
The Mystery Behind the Album
The entire narrative sparks from an unexpected place: a mail package delivered to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Inside is a leather-bound photo album. Inside the album are 116 pristine snapshots of SS officers, administrative assistants, and camp guards laughing, playing accordion, and relaxing at a picturesque resort retreat near Auschwitz.
One particular page features six photos of young German women—known as Helferinnen on the camp's communications staff—receiving bowls of berries from Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the Auschwitz commandant. The caption written underneath reads, "Hier gibt es Blaubeeren," or "Here there are blueberries."
Archivist Rebecca Erbelding and her team set out to identify the figures in these pictures. What follows isn't just a detective story; it's a chilling excavation of how ordinary people accommodated extraordinary cruelty. The play explores how a massive, industrial slaughterhouse function depended on thousands of tiny cogs who compartmentalized their daily tasks. As Holocaust historian Stefan Hördler notes in the piece, the whole process relied on dividing responsibilities so finely that absolutely nobody felt personally accountable for the total sum of the horror.
Why Smiling Nazis Are More Disturbing Than Monsters
We are culturally conditioned to look for monsters in shadows. We expect villains to look grotesque, unhinged, or visibly tormented by their own deeds. That expectation lets us off the hook.
The photographs in Höcker's album break that psychological safety net. These perpetrators look like your neighbors, your coworkers, or the people you pass at the grocery store. They joke around. They pet dogs. They pose cheerfully under the Nazi flag.
This is the exact terrain explored by Jonathan Glazer's film The Zone of Interest, but brought into the sharp, stark light of theatrical investigation. The production asks a profoundly uncomfortable question through its ensemble cast: What do you do with artifacts that humanize the perpetrators without absolving them?
Museum staffers in the play grapple with a fierce ethical dilemma. Does displaying these photos risk eliciting sympathy for mass murderers? Does it disrespect the millions who suffered just out of frame? The play doesn't hand you a neat, packaged moral lesson. It leaves you sitting with the friction.
The Reality Outside the Frame
The genius of Kaufman's direction is how it weaponizes theatrical restraint. Loud, sharp shutter clicks punctuate the air every time a new photograph flashes on screen. You hear the camera click, and you wait for the horror—only to see a barbecue or a birthday party.
Yet, the victims are never truly absent. Late in the performance, the production pivots away from the SS album to reveal the devastating photographs taken by the Nazis documenting the arrival ramps at Auschwitz—including the exact day survivor Lili Jacob and her family stepped off the train. The contrast is devastating. While Höcker and his colleagues were eating blueberries, thousands of human beings were marching toward the gas chambers just yards away.
This structure challenges the audience to look past the cozy domesticity of the perpetrators and remember the industrial machinery humming quietly in the background. It shatters the myth that evil requires a demonic mask.
Confronting Our Own Capacity for Complicity
The final movements of Here There Are Blueberries draw a straight line from 1944 to the present day. Some critics have argued that expanding the lens to modern apathy dilutes the specific historical weight of the Holocaust. But on stage, that expansive lens lands with a heavy thud.
The play isn't just a museum piece about World War II. It's a mirror held up to modern complacency. It asks how systems of harm continue to function today because good people choose convenience over courage, looking away from the violence happening just beyond their own comfortable frames.
You leave the theater realizing that the scariest part of history isn't that evil exists. It's how easily ordinary people learn to live with it, smile through it, and call it normal.
