Here There are Blueberries: Detroit Public Theater Through November 2

The current play at the DPT has a very innovative photo installation montage on stage to bring history to life; and yes, the play is about the Holocaust, but unlike other media we’ve consumed about this haunting time in history, there isn’t one photo depicting a starving concentration camp prisoner: there doesn’t need to be. Yet, the message is loud and clear: humanity was lost in so many ways.

The play was conceived and co-written by Moises Kaufman, who took his crew to Laramie, Wyoming after the torture and murder of Mathew Shepward in 1998. He interviewed the townspeople, police officers and their wives, university professors and more and those communications culminated into the moving theater piece The Laramie Project.

This time around, Kaufman focused on a discovery of a never seen photo album belonging to Karl-Friedrich Höcker, a Nazi war criminal, German commander in the SS and the adjutant to Richard Baer, who was a commandant of Auschwitz. It caused quite a stir when it arrived at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. in 2007 because it was so different from what they were used to, and they were not sure if showing the “happy” photos was the way to go. The descendant of the Nazi who kept the album struggled with whether or not to release them, but decided he must. Ultimately, the photos made their way to the public.

The play focuses on how curators unravelled the shocking truth behind the images, which made headlines around the world, and it toggles back and forth from 2007 to the years of the war up to modern times. As did The Laramie Project, Here There are Blueberries characters are real people who reveal their involvement in either the discovery of the photos (particularly good in this is Cheryl Turski, who plays the main museum curator) or their involvement with the camps (or their relatives’ involvement).

So, about the blueberries. The utter dichotomy of how the Nazis lived in luxury and happiness while humans were gassed and tortured near-by has been written about, and the film that was released last year, The Zone of Interest, was another piece of historic art showing this complete disconnect from humanity. But when we say Nazis, we don’t just mean soldiers. Auschwitz was a huge compound and employed so many Germans who thought they were just doing their jobs and serving their country, including many young women working as “admins/secretaries.” They enjoyed breaks in the summer (many of the staff were rewarded with stays at a lodge that was built for Nazis to earn vacation time with their families). One of the more striking photos the audience sees is of the young secretaries enjoying blueberries out in the sun during a break: cutting it up and joyfully enjoying their beautiful fruit while unspeakable suffering happened so close (which many of them denied knowing.) It’s a gut punch of a photo.

Combined with the photos are many moving monologues that reveal what the characters all think of what happened and what the photographs mean. Some of the characters are new generations of Germans whose relatives worked for the Nazi Party and were ashamed of the actions of their ancestors. Karl-Friedrich Höcker was the Nazi whose character is portrayed and not surprisingly, he had gone from being an unemployed banker to one of the higher ups at Auschwitz; the play focused on how especially easy it is to recruit those who need something to make themselves feel important.

All in all, the photographs and the incredibly detailed accounts of the photos and those who are in them give the play such depth and jaw-dropping revelations about the humans who were able to live their lives adjacent to such atrocities. Considering the rise in fascist ideals happening in the world today, it’s a timely and important piece of theater, and the performances and technology are outstanding.

The production runs through November 2. Detroit Public Theater: Detroit Public Theatre