The perpetrators of atrocity have always been a fascinating study. When faced with photographs of a Nazi’s face, what Jew has not looked deep into his or her eyes for a sign that betrays what makes a Nazi a Nazi.
But what are we looking for? A demonic glint? Some barely perceptible aura that suggests a slightly different species? This forensic Pulitzer-finalist docu-play co-written by director Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich allows the futile search to be called off.
At its core is a piece of Holocaust history. In 2006, a former American intelligence officer wrote to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. The letter asked if the museum would be interested in a photo album of Nazis at Auschwitz that had been in his possession since he was stationed in Germany after the war.
What followed is explained by the show’s narrator Rebecca Erbelding (Philippine Velge) who speaks to the audience against a backdrop of the museum’s archivist desks.
Erbelding is initially sceptical that the photographs are as described. She is aware of all the known relatively rare photographs taken at Auschwitz. But then she recognises the man whom she had already researched at length, Josef Mengele. He is smiling among a group of Nazi officers including the camp’s final commandant Richard Baer. It is quickly established that the photos belong to Baer’s proud adjutant Karl Höcker who is present in many of the photographs. What makes these pictures extraordinary is that they are entirely of happy and relaxed Nazis during their time off from the job of processing, guarding and tormenting the camp’s inmates and murdering 1.1 million of them.
The show’s projections design is hugely effective. Images are blown up to the size of the stage’s rear wall. Individuals are highlighted; details are expanded like a crime scene from a detective series.
Except in these images, there is no atrocity visible. The visible crime is the joy and happiness of those in the images.
Maps orientate us around the relative locations of Auschwitz, Birkenau and the other buildings that formed the Nazis’ biggest and most efficient death camp.
The moral dilemma of exhibiting perpetrators without victims is explored as Erbelding makes the case to her bosses for the images to be exhibited.
The production’s own answer to that question arrives later on with the images found by the survivor Lilly Jacob.
In the moments after being liberated from Auschwitz the exhausted and starved Jacob had found a different Nazi officer’s photo album, which by astounding coincidence included photos of Jacob and her family on the day they arrived at the camp before she was selected for work and they for gas.
By then the question of what particular thing allows a person to perpetrate atrocity while enjoying all the normal pleasures of life has long since been settled. The answer? Nothing.
Here There Are Blueberries
Stratford East
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