 |
| Members of the League of German Girls, who worked for the SS, eating blueberries. Image found here |
I found out about "Here There Are Blueberries" through the DC JCC. They partnered with the Shakespeare Theatre Company on this show and offered discounted tickets. I didn't know too much about the play, but I like supporting the arts, and I love a good deal, so I thought I'd go. I went on my own and headed to Sidney Harman Hall for the show Tuesday night. The show is only 90 minutes long with no intermission, so it's the perfect length!
This isn't the kind of play that has characters and a plot. It's more of a true story being told through a performance (or "documentary theater"). The show opens with a monologue (by Nemuna Ceesay) about the Leica camera that revolutionized photography: roughly during the time between the two World Wars, the personal camera was invented so that anyone could be a photographer anytime, anywhere. And this show focuses on a photo album that was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in 2007. What was so special about the album? It featured pictures of Auschwitz, but none of the photos showed any prisoners; they were all photographs of SS officers and other German staff members at their leisure, including at a resort lodge located only miles from the concentration camp. Many pictures like that had been lost or destroyed, either completely or in part (for example, sometimes the SS insignia on the uniforms would be torn out of photographs). So this album was, and is, a big deal.
 |
| Image found here. Photo credit: Rich Soublet II/La Jolla Playhouse |
The show centers around Rebecca Erbelding (played by Elizabeth Stahlmann), a real-life archivist and historian at USHMM, who worked on the project of dissecting this album: Should it be part of a collection that is meant to honor the victims, not glorify the persecutors? Who are the people in the pictures? When and where were they taken? The set of the play is the basement of the museum, where the historians, researchers, and the like work in the archives. There are several tables with desk lamps filling the stage, with a stone foundation backdrop. Throughout the show, images were projected onto the walls as well as the tables (they would be flipped up vertically). I really liked how the production brought the photos to life, not only by enlarging them and increasing the clarity, but also by adding color or even sound (for example, for the title picture, the actors would laugh and use bowls and spoons to make the scraping sound of the women eating blueberries from their cups.). It was almost jarring, hearing such laughter, because you know just a few miles away, millions of people were being systematically killed. The pictures show the human side of Nazis and makes you wonder how much they knew (especially the young women working in communications): How could these young girls be Nazis, but also, how could they be blind to the genocide happening around them?
 |
| Elizabeth Stahlmann playing Rebecca Erbelding. Image found here. Photo by Rich Soublet II. |
As Stahlmann is telling the story of the album, we learn about the global reaction it received when the USHMM released the photographs to the public. One German man recognized his grandfather in several of the pictures; while his grandfather never discussed the war much (clearly), he did say, despicably so, that it was "the best time of [his] life." Another descendant recognized his grandfather as well. His grandfather had been a doctor at Auschwitz and was horrified by the typhus epidemic and malnutrition at the camp; he nearly eradicated typhus there and really helped the prisoners. He wanted to quit the job (seeing that what was happening there was obviously very wrong), but his father and clergyman told him that what he was doing was right; even the prisoners asked for him to stay on, because they feared that things would be even worse without him (which is probably true). So this man stayed in his position as a doctor at the camp, but eight years after the war, he killed himself. Those two grandfathers had very different experiences as SS doctors at Auschwitz, and none of us may have known their stories without their grandsons coming forward. That first grandson talked about how his parents' generation didn't talk about what happened in the war, so his generation needed to be different, and it is.
Later on in the play, someone else (also played by Stahlmann) donates another photo album, but this time the pictures are of the actual camp at Auschwitz, showing thousands of Jews upon arrival from the trains. The most amazing part of this story is the connection between the person who found the album and the photos inside of it. Upon liberation of the camp, a young Jewish woman collapsed from her malnourishment. She was resting inside an SS office building on site, and when she got cold, she looked in a cabinet for a blanket. Instead she found a photo album. As she flipped through the pictures, she saw faces she knew: her grandparents, her two little brothers, herself with a shaved head. She realized that these photographs were taken on the day of her family's arrival to Auschwitz from Hungary; she was the only survivor. Stahlmann was just as wonderful portraying this survivor as she was performing Erbelding; I felt like she had transformed into this Hungarian woman, and her tears nearly brought me to tears, too.
The work on the museum (and in part this play) is to "take experience and turn it into knowledge," broadening the captured moment of an individual and extrapolating it for the general public. I visited Yad Vashem in Israel (read that blog post here), so after seeing this show, I may finally have to visit the Holocaust Museum in my own backyard here in D.C. Stories like these are so powerful, and I am amazed how well a museum collection could be turned into a live performance like this.
It's not too late to get tickets to see this show! Purchase tickets here.
Further reading:
No comments:
Post a Comment