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Superb Holocaust play on Broadway shows chilling images of Nazis at Auschwitz relaxing and partying
“Here There Are Blueberries”, a Broadway play by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, examines photographs of Nazi officers and their families relaxing near Auschwitz. The images challenge familiar ways of presenting Holocaust history by showing perpetrators’ ordinary home lives alongside the camp’s atrocities.
The play centres on a photo album donated to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007, whose pictures rarely show the camp or its prisoners. Archivist Rebecca Erbelding investigates the album, while German man Tilman Taube recognises his grandfather in some images and helps researchers explore who assembled it and what the people pictured knew. The production runs for 90 minutes without an interval at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.
In short
- A Broadway play examines Nazi family photos taken near Auschwitz.
- The album was donated to a US Holocaust museum in 2007.
- Researchers investigate what the images reveal about perpetrators.
Explained simply
Auschwitz was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp in occupied Poland during the Second World War, where more than a million people were murdered, most of them Jews. Nazi staff worked and lived near the camp, and the Holocaust involved both organised persecution and the everyday choices of those who carried it out.
The play centres on an album of photographs given to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007. Archivist Rebecca Erbelding investigates the pictures, and Tilman Taube helps researchers identify people in them, including his grandfather. The images show Nazi officers and their families at leisure, raising questions about what those pictured knew and how ordinary life existed alongside mass murder.