Interview: In Here There Are Blueberries, Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich Tell a New Holocaust Story

In 2007, a photo album made its way to Rebecca Erbelding, an archivist at the United States Holocaust Museum. The book, now known as the Höcker Album, contained more than 100 images believed to have been collected by SS officer Karl-Friedrich Höcker, which depicted Auschwitz commandants Richard Baer and Rudolph Höss, as well as “Angel of Death” physician Josef Mengele, going about their daily lives.

When Tectonic Theatre Project founder Moisés Kaufman heard about the album, he instantly imagined a play — a detective story about an archivist unravelling the mystery behind these photographs, where the people in the images become characters themselves. Writing with fellow company member Amanda Gronich, Here There Are Blueberries has had runs at La Jolla Playhouse and Shakespeare Theatre Company, and is now having its New York premiere at New York Theatre Workshop.

This new drama is a cautionary tale, the writers assert, reminding us of the importance of not just remembering the victims, but the perpetrators, too.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

The work of archivists is important, and it’s also one of those jobs where people don’t understand the complexities. Why was it important for you to immortalize that in Here There Are Blueberries?
Moisés Kaufman: I find great nobility in their pursuit. To spend hours focusing on the minutiae of history is so moving to me. It’s not dissimilar to what we do in theater, or, at least, the kind of theater that I like to do. We go into a space, and we try to understand something about the human condition. One of the reasons we wanted to write this play was to honor this pursuit.

Amanda Gronich: It’s so important for all of us to participate in the telling of our history, and to examine the artifacts of our own lives and families. The telling of history is in no small part based on what history leaves behind, and if we don’t decipher the evidence and explore the mysteries therein, we don’t get the full story.

This is a play that’s based on a photo album of, essentially, people going about their lives. Until you realize —
Moisés: Until you realize what’s outside the frame. And that struck me. My father is a Holocaust survivor. I always wanted to write a play about the Holocaust, but the Holocaust is the historical event that has been most-written about in the history of humanity. What else is there to say? I saw that photo and I thought “Oh, this is new.” I had a very strong visceral response to the photos because it’s exactly what you said. It looked like any outing any of us could have gone on. I thought there was a play there.

What we do at Tectonic Theatre Project is explore theatrical languages and forms. We started the company because we were bored to death with realism and naturalism. In every play we do, we try to explore a new form. Gross Indecency was based on trial transcripts. Laramie Project was based on interviews. 33 Variations was based on a piece of music. Could we make a play in which photographs carry a large part of the narrative? That was the question.

Amanda: If we can invite the audience to step inside the photo album of a Nazi, what does that look like? From a practical standpoint, this artifact comes out of a box at the beginning of the play, and it begins to take over the stage. The actors are engaging with the pictures like they’re scene partners, and we’re inviting the audience to go on this detective story by stepping into the selfies of an SS officer.

Moisés: When we went to La Jolla, we didn’t know if this experiment was going to work. We didn’t know if the pictures were going to carry the narrative as much as we needed them to. But it was incredible to do it there, because I’ve never heard that kind of silence from an audience. They’re watching the actors, but they’re also scrutinizing the images and forming emotional ties with the people in the photographs. We have been able to make the people in the images characters in the play.

Amanda: I’m always so fascinated by the reactions that we get. When we were writing, the thing that was most terrifying for me was wondering what would happen if survivors came to see this play. You’re going through the full playwright’s angst of “how dare I explore this material in this way?” We had dinner with a remarkable woman who was at Auschwitz during the time these photographs were taken, and Rebecca at the museum spoke with another Auschwitz survivor who was there at the time these photographs were taken, and they’ve both said that this story must be told so the audience can see it for themselves.

What is the story behind the title, Here There Are Blueberries?
Moisés: This is an album of photographs of Auschwitz, and you’re taking the care to put all the photographs exactly where you want them. And then you can see that he carefully wrote down “Here There Are Blueberries.” To me, that encapsulates the whole endeavor.

Amanda: It’s his storytelling.

Moisés: For a while, we were going to call the play The Album, and everybody hated it. And then we were going to call it The Album — Here There Are Blueberries. And everybody hated that title even more. There are still people who don’t like the title. But then they come see the show and they understand that it’s a really good title.

Amanda: That’s the only title it could have been. Like, how do you look at that picture and that’s the caption you write?

Moisés: For the last 70 years, scholarship has been focused on what happened to the victims. In the last 10 years, there’s been a shift, and more scholarship has been focusing on the perpetrators and how they did it. How can you eat blueberries next to a concentration camp? And I think it’s time. That generation is passing away and it’s time to not forget them, not by retelling their stories, which of course are important, but by looking at how the people who did it, did it.

Amanda: There’s an incredible statistic I came across in my research. In a population of roughly 71 million people at the time, it took one million people to carry out the actions, and 70 million people to look the other way. How did this happen? How did they carry out those actions? And how did they see themselves as they did it? If we portray them as rabid sociopathic monsters, we learn nothing.

Moisés: Not only do we learn nothing, but we perpetuate the idea that they’re different from us.