Imagine a world where overnight, you and yours become the most reviled, hated and vilified group in your country. You are marked as “different”, your livelihood, home and family along with everyone you know are stripped of worldly good and dignity and subjected to the most heinous torture hard labor and suffering. And you find that you may be the only surviving member of your family. 80 years later, can justice truly be done? This is only one of the questions at the heart of McCarter’s latest brilliant production. Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich and their Tectonic Theater Project have opened an old, deep wound and this time perhaps healing can begin.
“Here There Are Blueberries” illustrates the historical referent for Hannah Arendt’s famous introduction of the “banality of evil”. While she was referring to Adolph Eichmann and how he carried himself during his trial, this play centers around a single photo album. This photo album is full of photos that these days would be featured in an online newsletter. This very personal album, however, shows the off-duty time of SS officers and their families. Some of these enjoyable memories were created on the same parcel of land where one of history’s most famous attempts at genocide occurred. And yet, these people in these pictures could be our own grandparents or great grandparents. How do we separate the sins of our family from the love that we know or knew from them? What is there for us to learn about how to DO better, now that we KNOW better?
The story begins in 2007 when a young archivist, Rebecca Erbelding working at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, receives a call from a mysterious former military man who has an album he’d like to share. It has been in his possession for more than 60 years and he believes it to be from Auschwitz. Initially skeptical, when Rebecca first views the album, it shakes her to the core. This is an important document that touches off a firestorm and the journey of the album, what it reveals about ourselves in the present and the circumstances of it’s being brought to light are powerful in repercussion. You will be hungry for more, and the program includes links for the Museum as well as FASPE, the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics. After all, there were professionals – journalists, doctors, lawyers and teachers, and more, who were complicit in the process that took the lives of more than 6 million people.
“Here There Are Blueberries” continues only through February 9 and good seats are going fast! Work to get seats for the talkback, and take your friends with you. This is truly a show to remember. Visit the box office at www.McCarter.org.