"Here There are Blueberries"
Detroit Public Theatre
Detroit, Mich.
Through Nov. 2, 2025
You’ve probably seen this sentiment posted on social media: “if you’ve ever wondered what you would have done during the Holocaust, you’re doing it right now.” Here There Are Blueberries, now on at Detroit Public Theatre, confronts us with this in a harrowing way.
Written by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, Here There Are Blueberries tells the story of a photo album of Auschwitz that was donated to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Except the album doesn’t include any of the Jewish people imprisoned at Auschwitz, and instead feels more like an SS vacation album. The play follows museum curators as they try to decode who is pictured in the photos and who the album belongs to. Along the way, we meet descendants of the SS officers, who are grappling with their relatives’ involvement in the Holocaust. The play has its first licensed run in the United States at the Detroit Public Theatre until Nov. 2.
It feels like watching a documentary. These are real photos of the Nazis who ran Auschwitz that were donated to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2007. The album belonged to high-ranking SS officer Karl-Friedrich Höcker.
The play’s name comes from a photo of young women of the SS smiling and eating blueberries on the grounds of Auschwitz, mere miles away from the gas chambers, that is captioned “here there are blueberries.” There are other photos of SS officers celebrating, singing, and vacationing at Solahütte, a lodge about 20 miles away from the camp. Josef Mengele, the so-called “Angel of Death,” is also pictured.
A question posed throughout the play is whether the young women, who worked as telegram and radio operators under the SS-Helferinnen (or “helpers”) division, knew that 1 million Jewish people were being massacred on the camp grounds. In the play, we hear the former SS officers and a Helferinnen member feign ignorance, but it is impossible that they could be that clueless.
At a Pagan Summer Solstice festival, I once bought a T-shirt that said “No Nazis in Valhalla,” with “Nazis fuck off” written in runes. Afterward a German woman in attendance approached me and expressed a confusing combination of emotions. Her face changed from recognition to grief to dissonance as she grappled with (what I now realize is likely) the idea that some of her family members and friends are not good people after all.
We don’t get to escape our actions and the impact they have on others, especially when it’s something as heinous as genocide. Human beings who commit acts of extreme violence often compartmentalize so they don’t have to face themselves and the horrors they have inflicted upon others. I once watched a documentary about the trials of former SS officers, and their defense was often that they were just following orders.
As we see our country regress into a fascist regime — a continued genocide in Palestine funded by our tax dollars and immigrants kidknapped by ICE and detained without due process — we all have a responsibility not to allow apathy to take over our morality. Somewhere, deep down in the soul of ICE agents, there is a human being with a conscience. They have to reconnect with that, and remember our collective humanity, to stop this madness before it is too late. “Following orders” is no justification for brutality.
“People in power are often afraid of artists speaking the truth, because when we’re in a room together and our heartbeats are syncing and our breathing is synced up together, we can understand each other in a different way,” director Amy Marie Seidel told me after the play. “On some level, even oppressors understand that, and that’s what they’re afraid of, is that we together, can make a difference.”
She adds, “the hope is every person, from their seat, will take away what they need to be a little bit better today… and that we can sort of start to see ourselves in some of the characters and then ask, ‘What can we do now?’”
As the play concluded, overwhelming grief began to rise so strongly within me that I wanted to crawl inside my skin to escape it, like wrapping myself in a warm hug. I felt like a mess of crumpled, soggy paper, fighting back the urge to wail out in agony (I literally had to put my hand over my mouth). The woman beside me asked if I was OK, her concerned eyes trying to pull me from the void of despair swallowing me, and I could barely whisper, “no.”
The theatre would benefit from having a quiet space for reflection, or an on-site grief specialist to help sensitive people like me regulate our nervous systems after watching such sensitive subject matter, like they did for DRONE.
Wiping the stream of tears from my face, I cradled myself in my own arms, taking deep breaths so I could pretend to be normal before I returned to the lobby to socialize with other attendees and theatre personnel. And that’s life, isn’t it? A fragile balancing act of carrying the grief of all the horrible shit happening in the world, while continuing our day-to-day lives as normal. Except there is nothing normal about this nightmare world that we have awoken to find ourselves in.
This review was published in conjunction with Detroit Metro Times. Click here to read a previous review of the play published in Midbrow.
