In December 2006, a letter landed on the desk of a young archivist called Rebecca Erbelding who worked at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The writer of the correspondence, who it was later revealed was formerly a member of United States intelligence, claimed he had in his possession a collection of photographs of Nazis at Auschwitz.
Erbelding was sceptical. There were relatively few such photographs in existence and the archivist knew them all. However, the 16-page photo album that arrived turned out to be genuine. It contained 116 photographs. Most showed Nazis during their time off from the job of processing, guarding and tormenting the camp’s inmates and murdering 1.1 million of them.
Today the collection forms the backbone of a Pulitzer-nominated play that is making its UK debut. Directed by the acclaimed Venezuelan/American dramatist Moisés Kaufman, Here There Are Blueberries, which opens this week at London’s Stratford East theatre, charts the forensic process
of validating a vital trove of Holocaust evidence while also exploring the ability of humans to simultaneously be playful and civil one moment and cruel and murderous in the next.
Captured on film: Nazis in photos shown in Here There Are Blueberries (Photo: Mark Senior)[Missing Credit]
Rebecca Erbelding (Photo: Mark Coburn)[Missing Credit]
One of the photos, which shows female SS communications specialists enjoying bowls of blueberries, was taken on the day researchers know that 150 prisoners arrived at the Birkenau section of the camp. One hundred and seven of the 150 were immediately gassed. The date was July 22, 1944. July is high season for blueberries in Poland. “There were almost no photos of Auschwitz,” says Erbelding who is now a historian at the museum, during a video call. “The photos that existed when it was in operation are very specific and well known. There are some taken by a member of the Sonderkommando of mass killing in the late summer of 1944; there’s a famous album documenting the process of several transports of Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz; there are pictures that Heinrich Himmler took of the camp earlier in the 1940s, and construction and mugshots. These were the categories totalling in the very low thousands, except for the mugshots, which are a larger spectrum of photos.”
The new album was the work of Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the camp’s final commandant Richard Baer. The pictures include senior SS officers at their most relaxed, singing and frolicking with SS women. However it was when Erbelding saw pictures of Mengele that she knew that the album represented something extraordinary.
Framed horror: scene from Here There Are Blueberries (Photo: Mark Senior)[Missing Credit]
“That was the first ‘Aha!’ moment for me. I knew that there were photos of Mengele before the camp and after the camp, but not during the camp. I knew this was new,” says Erbelding who has written an academic paper on Mengele. She is one of the significant real-life characters in Kaufman’s production.
“I realised that the play had to be a detective story,’ says Kaufman when we meet during a break in rehearsals.
“Becky spent two years identifying people, trying to find what day a photograph took place, trying to find out what was happening, what they are doing. So I allow the audience to become co-detectives in trying to understand the psychology of these humans.”
Kaufman, a Tony and Emmy-nominated director and playwright who received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2016, has a link to the source material in his show. His uncle was in one of the trains in one of the photographs in the show. Where the production addresses the 430,000 Hungarian Jews of whom 370,000 were killed in two months, the numbers include Kaufman’s uncle, his paternal grandparents, and his great aunt.
“I always thought as a playwright I must at some point write something about it,” says the dramatist. The 62-year-old speaks in a softly spoken, relentlessly articulate South American lilt. “But I was always afraid to write about the one event in history that has been most written about. What else is there to say that is new? But when I saw these pictures, I thought, these are new. This is something we don’t know about. For the longest time, the focus was on the victims. Now that the victims are dying out the focus is on the perpetrators.”
We are sitting in a wardrobe room. The clothes hang tidily on a rail in mute witness to the conversation.
“When I first saw the photographs I felt sick to my stomach,” says Kaufman. “These people are singing with an accordion or eating blueberries or lighting a Christmas tree. So my purpose in writing the play was to understand how human beings find a way to come to terms with that kind of murder and at the same time lead what appears to be from the photographs normal, quotidian lives.”
Kaufman wrote Blueberries with Amanda Gronich, with whom he previously wrote the highly acclaimed The Laramie Project, exploring the homophobic, terrifyingly violent murder of gay student Michael Shepherd. As was the case with that verbatim play, Kaufman and Gronich conducted more than 250 hours of interviews for Blueberries. When they began writing it Donald Trump was in his first term as US president. “Holocaust is a metaphor that is overused,” says Kaufman, “and there was a great distance between what they [the Nazis] were doing and what people in the Trump administration are doing. At least there was then. Now the distance is smaller when you have ICE agents covering their faces and going to people’s houses without warrants. But even in the first term I had a feeling that something was changing, that there was a real turn towards totalitarianism.”
Does he feel conflicted about the abduction of the Venezuelan leader Maduro? “Very. Because, on the one hand there is this incredible joy that the moral balance of the universe has been straightened a bit to see this bloody murderer in handcuffs and wearing a jumpsuit in front of a judge in New Jersey. [But] as an American, I am keenly aware of the danger that has been escalated by this American president.”
Kaufman has been aware of the victims of totalitarianism since he was a child. He was born into a “very, very Orthodox” home and raised in a community of Holocaust survivors. This fostered a curiosity about “man’s inhumanity to man”. Is it something demanded by human nature?
“I think that is the question that has permeated a lot of my work. This is why the [Auschwitz] photos were so intriguing to me.”
As a boy Kaufman remembers walking to shul with his brother and father, all three in dark suits attracting bewildered stares as they made their way through the streets of tropical Caracas. The Jewish community arrived at a time “the United States wasn’t allowing a lot of Jews in”. Kaufman went to a yeshiva “all his life in Venezuela” until he emigrated to America in 1987 in his early twenties, partly to work in theatre but also because being gay in an Orthodox community in a “machista” society made him feel that he was “a great malady that had to be cured”.
Of the many conversations and interviews Kaufman and Gronich conducted before writing their play, one in particular has stuck with Kaufman ever since.
“We interviewed an ethicist about how it is possible to prevent oneself from behaving unethically.”
Kaufman then sets out the ethicist’s response in one long almost breathless sentence: “You’re a civil servant in Germany in 1933 and the first thing Hitler does is fire your Jewish colleagues, one of whom was your boss whose job is offered to you and even though he was your friend and your wife reasonably points out that if you don’t take it someone else will and anyway we could use the money what with another child on the way. Then the Jew’s house becomes available, you feel awful but it’s not like you’re the one who evicted him…”
Kaufman pauses. “What the ethicist says is that unless you have a very strong ethical system before it gets tested you will proceed to create an ethical system that justifies doing what you want to do.”
Is it not easy, however, to make judgments about the choices people make under pressure while living the somewhat privileged life of an acclaimed theatre director? For once Kaufman’s answer is preceded by hesitation. “It would be a lie to say this question doesn’t haunt me,” says Kaufman. “It’s easy to make edicts about morality and ethics when you live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But I also think that privilege brings with it moral duty. If you have the privilege of being an artist who looks at the world, this responsibility must be taken seriously. That’s why I dedicate my life to projects like this.”
Here There Are Blueberries is at Theatre Royal Stratford until Feb 28. stratfordeast.com/whats-on/all-shows/here-there-are-blueberries
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