"Here There are Blueberries"
Detroit Public Theatre
Detroit, Mich.
Through Nov. 2, 2025
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and when those pictures – an entire photo album’s worth – are of smiling Nazis, that’s a whole lot of words to read.
Those are explored in Moisés Kaufman’s “Here There are Blueberries,” now performing at Detroit Public Theatre. The Pulitzer Prize-nominated play is based on the real 2007 discovery of a hidden photo album with rare images of the life of Nazis at a notorious concentration camp and its subsequent aftermath.
Directed by Amy Marie Seidel, the ensemble cast includes Cheryl Turski, Diane Hill, Artun Kircali, Kate McClaine, Ron Williams, Rebecca Rose Mims, Sam Reeder and Eric Gutman. The actors each portray multiple roles, including museum archivists and modern-day Nazi descendants.
The play is a thoughtful and careful exploration of the humanity behind the Nazis and what that means for humanity in general. It tries to understand how a collective group of presumably decent, intelligent people – not born monsters – could be capable of committing or being complicit in such horrendous crimes.
It opens with U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist Rebecca Erbelding (Turski) receiving a mysterious photo album, believed to be taken at Auschwitz during World War II. But instead of dire images of Holocaust victims, Rebecca and her team are surprised to find a series of happy photographs of the Nazis who ran the camp. They see images of officers and administrators at leisure, sometimes rewarded with stays at the on-site Solahütte family retreat, sometimes enjoying a bowl of blueberries as a treat – the photo from which the play derives its title. The archivists question how much the smiling faces – especially of the lower-ranking staff – knew about the true horrors happening inside the camp.
Fascinated by this rare glimpse into life at Auschwitz, especially from the Nazi side, the museum releases the photos to the media. This begins a journey that helps them identify the people in the pictures and connect with their descendants. They learn the album belonged to Karl Höcker, the camp’s deputy commander, and featured multiple images of him as well as other high-ranking Nazis.
One of the descendants is Tilman Taube, (Kircali), who recognizes his grandfather and identifies him as Dr. Heinz Baumkötter, the head doctor of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Tilman decides to use his family’s dark past to connect with other descendants of Nazis to help the museum identify more people in the photos and understand their lives. One of those descendants was Rainer Höss (Reeder), the grandson of Auschwitz Commander Rudolf Höss.
In one of the most poignant monologues, Reeder portrays Höss’s struggle to come to terms with his family history. He grapples to accept the family secret, simultaneously disgusted while recognizing similar demons within himself and questioning how much evil is hereditary and how much is choice.
In another scene, McClaine portrays one of the lower-ranking women at the camp, describing her process of compartmentalizing her conscience from her role in the genocide, justifying it as necessary for the greater good they’ve been taught to believe.
The play does not let the Nazis off the hook. Toward the end of the show Turski transitions to Auschwitz survivor Lilly Jacob, who discovered a similar photo album – presumably also from Höcker – of Holocaust victims, where she shockingly discovers photos of herself and her family. She recounts the day of her arrival, where she is immediately separated from her parents, the only one deemed fit for work, never to see them again. It’s a reminder – after all the backstories and families of the Nazis we’ve met – of the horror they inflicted upon millions.
The set is clever, with stacks and desks to represent the museum and photos from the album prominently projected throughout the performance, with individuals and scenes highlighted as referenced. The play makes sure we know the faces of the names responsible the horrors.
The cast is excellent, carrying the weight of the gravity of the material, switching smoothly between thoughtful modern-day researchers and guilt and shame-ridden Nazi descents, struggling to accept the horrors of their family histories.
We like to think of Nazis under a blanket umbrella of pure evil and the Holocaust as something solidly in the past. The reality is that Nazis were not an exclusive group of villains. They were everyday people like the rest of us who developed into that evil, and “Here There Are Blueberries” is an attempt to understand how. As we watch many in our own society embrace a similar “us versus them” mentality and justify the hatred toward the “other” for a supposed greater good, answering that question is more important than ever.
“Here There Are Blueberries” is a timely, thought-provoking play that delicately and fairly examines the humans behind the horrors. It offers us a glimpse into their thought processes, justifications and even select “good” parts, while still holding them accountable. As a chilling Kircali notes toward the end of the play, “My grandfather said it was the best time of his life.”
