The soul-draining photographs of playtime at Auschwitz are all-encompassing in the new play at the cultural center of Beverly Hills, where the commonality of atrocity must be endured.
By John Lavitt
Beverly Hills, CA (The Hollywood Times) 03-18-2024
Some nights at the theater entertain. Others provoke. And then there are nights like this—where the weight of history settles over an audience like an unshakable fog, leaving silence in its wake. Here There Are Blueberries is not just a play; it is an endurance test, an excavation of human darkness that demands we look at the unthinkable.
“For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth… Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period… “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”
- Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil“
In 1962, as a Jewish intellectual who had barely escaped Nazi Germany herself, Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) was commissioned by The New Yorker to travel to Jerusalem and cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal architects of the Holocaust as Adolph Hitler’s number one bureaucrat. In her subsequent book – Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt wrote about the quiet, little man who was one of history’s greatest monsters: “What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.”
Such is the case as the Tectonic Theatre Project takes over the Bram Goldsmith Theatre at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts to tell an unnerving story that demands endurance and fortitude. Conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman and written by Kaufman & Amanda Gronich, “Here There Are Blueberries” is a theatrical excavation of the unseen horrors of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland. However, the horrors have nothing to do with the inmates or the crematoria, with the gas chambers or the cattle cars overflowing with innocent victims.
Instead, they present something altogether unexpected and devastating – the absurdly pleasant, everyday lives of the perpetrators of these unspeakable crimes. This concept—the terrifying ordinariness of those committing such crimes—is at the play’s heart. Unlike most Holocaust narratives, this play does not focus on the victims, the gas chambers, or the cattle cars. Instead, it forces us to witness something even more insidious: the mundanity of the perpetrators.
When an album of photographs arrived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., historian Rebecca Erbelding could not believe what she saw. Rather than the horrors, she saw the perpetrators of the genocide at Auschwitz during their off hours, smiling and having fun. She saw many of the most notorious figures of the Second World War enjoying their lives in the camp. These were not monsters in the shadows. They were ordinary men and women, capable of joy, kindness, and camaraderie. And yet, they facilitated one of the greatest atrocities in human history.
The cast of the play – Scott Barrow, Nemuna Ceesay, Delia Cunningham, Luke Forbes, Barbara Pitts, Jeanne Sakata, Marrick Smith, Grant James Varjas, Anna Shafer, and Sam Reeder – deliver powerful performances, but their presence is secondary to the weight of what is being revealed. The work of the entire Tectonic Theatre Project is to be commended, but I am not sure what a commendation means in this context. A presence here is so unspeakable that it must be spoken, but it drowns out the rest.
Nothing seems to matter beyond the photographs. Like Arendt’s take on Eichmann, the play reveals the banality of the perpetrators of the most horrifying death camp in human history. In the play, we discover the photo album of Karl-Friedrich Höcker, put together to commemorate his happy times as the adjutant to Richard Baer. Baer was the Commandant of Auschwitz I concentration camp from May 1944 to December 1944, responsible for the genocide of countless victims. In his pictures, we see the laid-back postures of Auschwitz guards and SS thugs on vacation in a chalet named Solahütte that the prisoners built.
And it gets worse. We see Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, smiling with his friends, including Rudolf Höss, the camp’s former commandant. He had returned to Auschwitz between May and July 1944 specifically to oversee the arrival of the Hungarian Jews. There is a picture of all the monsters celebrating at Solahütte, and the historians at the Holocaust Museum put two and two together. They are celebrating the extermination of 350,000 Hungarian Jews over six weeks, the most ever killed in that time frame. Indeed, according to aushwitz.net, “During its most frenzied periods, in the Spring of 1944, the number of murdered reached 10,000 a day.”
That picture is the one in this article. The tall man at the far right is Josef Mengele. We did not have pictures of him at Auschwitz before these photos were revealed. I do not have the stomach to show you anymore or spend more time with these murderers. The mediocrity of these men listening to an accordion player as they drink and revel in death will forever haunt me. “Here There Are Blueberries” is so hard, but it is necessary. In truth, it is essential because we cannot allow such pictures ever to be taken again.
Still, how do we process such images? How do we reconcile the casual joy of these men with the suffering they inflicted? I do not think that such a reconciliation is possible. The black hole of the banality of evil is unforgiving and consumes the soul. As I finish this piece, which fails on so many levels, there are tears in my eyes. Everything is heavy, and I need to go to bed.