One of the hottest tickets on the Island this month was for Here There Are Blueberries, the latest work from New York’s Tectonic Theatre Project, which had three sold-out readings at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse over the weekend.
The play’s deceptively rustic title was originally a hand-written German caption, from a photo album found at the infamous concentration camp Auschwitz in 1945 and hidden in an American officer’s personal archive for more than 60 years.
With 116 photographs in all, the album showed nothing from the camp itself. Instead, it was filled with images of Nazi officers and young female office workers at their leisure, enjoying time away from their genocidal day jobs.
Sunbathing, singing, enjoying fresh berries as a treat: “These people seem so normal. They’re engaging in lives just like we are,” said Scott Barrow, who directed the Playhouse reading.
Mr. Barrow also worked to create Here There Are Blueberries with playwrights Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich and other members of Tectonic Theatre Project, which debuted the play in 2018.
Combining projected images with documentary statements — including testimony from postwar trials and interviews with survivors — Here There Are Blueberries unfolds like a chilling thriller, with multiple mysteries to be solved.
First: Who, exactly, were the Germans in the photographs?
Researchers at the U.S Holocaust Museum were divided on what to do with the album when it came into their hands in 2007.
“There is a sense at our museum that we should focus on the victims, not on the perpetrators,” says curator Judy Cohen, played by acclaimed stage actress Kathleen Chalfont.
Archivist Rebecca Erbelding, however, believed the photographs held essential clues to another, more intractable mystery: how the Holocaust came to be.
“This album belongs here. Six million people didn’t murder themselves,” says her character, played by Tsilala Brock, in the play.
Investigating the identity of the Nazi officers in the photos led to contact with some of their descendants, who also appear as characters in Here There Are Blueberries as they wrestle with the weight of their families’ history.
“I am the grandson of a mass murderer. I can’t change that. But I am who I choose to be,” says Reiner Höss, whose grandfather Rudolf Höss designed and ran Auschwitz while raising his family just over the camp wall, as seen in the 2023 film The Zone of Interest.
The younger Höss, played on the Vineyard by Joshua Olumide, knows his grandfather was a monster but carries his name nonetheless.
“I’ll always keep the name,” he says. “It’s my best revenge, to live my life differently.”
Another mystery: Where did all the girls come from?
The smiling young women in the photographs, eating berries and singing with their Nazi camp boss, were responsible for telegraphing higher-ups about the arrival of train cars filled with Jewish prisoners and the subsequent disposal of their lives to the slow horror of forced labor or immediate death in the gas chambers.
Melita Maschmann, former head of press and propaganda for the League of German Girls, testified to the appeal of Nazi ideology for young women in the 1930s and 1940s.
“We had been raised in a poor country that had lost the First World War. We, the rising generation, who stood on the threshold between childhood and adolescence at the time of Hitler, we had been fatally prepared to fall for his ideas,” testifies Ms. Maschmann, played by playhouse artistic director Brooke Hardman Ditchfield.
The misery of urban Jews was visible for all to see, Ms. Maschmann recalls, but she suppressed any sense of compassion until she felt it no longer.
“I believed one must harden oneself against the sight of human suffering. People who want to build empires cannot afford to be squeamish,” she says.
Here There Are Blueberries does not ignore these victims: There was another Auschwitz album, discovered by prisoner Lili Jacobs on the day the camp was liberated, that shows the emaciated victims, the frightened newcomers and the railroad tracks that led them there in unventilated boxcars.
“These people are about to be taken into the gas chambers,” testifies Ms. Jacobs, who spotted herself, her parents and a familiar rabbi in the snapshots.
“I never saw my family again. They were just ripped away. All I have left of my family is these pictures. What is unbelievable is that it is I who found this album,” she says.
The playhouse readings were followed by onstage conversations with Ms. Erbelding and her husband, Holocaust Museum librarian Ron Coleman, with Mr. Barrow and other members of the cast.
While some audience members wondered whether the play could be made into a film, like The Zone of Interest, Mr. Barrow said that Here There Are Blueberries was created expressly for live performances.
“This is a theatrical piece, and it can do radically different things. The fact that we’re all sitting here having seen the same thing and have very, very, very different experiences is again the success of the theater and this medium,” he said.
“If the content is very similar, the form, meaning the bowl that holds the content, is radically different,” Mr. Barrow said.
The script for Here There Are Blueberries — which includes all of the photographs — can be purchased from Concord Theatricals.
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