The Perils of Ambiguity in ‘Here There Are Blueberries’

“When are you culpable? When are you complicit? And when are you complacent?”These are the questions playwright Moisés Kaufman has said the wants audiences to consider after seeing “Here There Are Blueberries,” now on Broadway. They are important questions, and ones worth asking. But I left the theater troubled by something else: what happens when a play about the Holocaust leaves too much ambiguity around an audience drawing their own moral conclusions?The play begins with a fascinating discovery. In 2007, a water-damaged photo album arrives at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Assembled by SS officer Karl-Friedrich Höcker, its pages document the private lives of SS officers and female auxiliaries, or Helferinnen, stationed at Auschwitz. There are no gas chambers or emaciated prisoners. Instead, we see Nazis laughing, flirting, sunbathing and enjoying bowls of freshly picked blueberries. These were the people helping run Auschwitz, apparently enjoying themselves just beyond the killing fields.The production is extraordinary in the way it brings these photographs to life. Through projections, sound and staging, what could have been a static historical investigation becomes a gripping detective story.Among the subjects are the SS Helferinnen, young women who worked in camp communications. Their duties might sound mundane, but they transmitted information about incoming prisoners, including those designated for Sonderbehandlung, the Nazi euphemism for murder. They knew what was happening.At one point, Judy Cohen, director of the museum’s photographic collection, describes how she protects herself emotionally while studying the Holocaust. She puts on blinders, concentrating on dates and details rather than absorbing the full horror of what she’s documenting. Historian Rebecca Erbelding wonders whether the Nazis relied on a similar form of compartmentalization to reconcile their work with their domestic lives.I found this comparison troubling. Surely there is a fundamental difference between creating enough emotional distance to document an atrocity and creating enough moral distance to participate in one. The psychological mechanism may be similar, but the moral implications could hardly be more different.For me, the most powerful moment comes toward the end, when we learn about another album from Auschwitz. This one, preserved at Yad Vashem, documents the arrival of Hungarian Jews in 1944. It was discovered after liberation by Lili Jacob, a young survivor who recognized herself, her family and members of her community in its pages. Her parents and younger brothers had been sent to the gas chambers. These photographs were her only tangible connections to them.Then comes an extraordinary detail. Karl Höcker, the officer who assembled the first album, arrived at Auschwitz on May 25, 1944. Jacob and her family arrived the very next day.Here were two photographic records of the same place and time. One captured the leisures of the perpetrators; the other, the final hours of their victims. For a moment, the people missing from the first album were finally brought into view. For me, this was the play’s most powerful moment, yet it arrives so late and briefly that it feels almost like a footnote.That matters because the play’s invitation to recognize ourselves in the perpetrators risks becoming untethered from historical specificity. The play repeatedly asks audiences to consider how ordinary people become complicit in extraordinary evil. But without sufficient attention to the particular history of the Holocaust, that invitation risks becoming an exercise in projecting our contemporary politics onto the past.When the word genocide enters the performance, it is difficult, in 2026, not to hear echoes of Gaza. The allegation that Israel is committing genocide demands examination on its own evidence and legal merits. Palestinian suffering must not be minimized, and criticism of Israel, like criticism of any democratic government, is legitimate. But there is a difference between investigating that accusation and casting Israelis or Zionists as the new Nazis. Holocaust inversion has become a familiar feature of anti-Israel rhetoric, turning the defining catastrophe of Jewish history into an indictment of Jews themselves.“Here There Are Blueberries” makes no explicit comparison between Auschwitz and Gaza. Still, I wondered what different audience members would take away from it. Some might reflect on the dangers of conformity or indifference. Others might find confirmation for their belief that Jewish power today represents the very evil Jews once suffered.Meanwhile, amid historically elevated levels of antisemitism, Jewish and Israeli artists, writers and academics face exclusion because of their nationality or presumed political beliefs. I am not suggesting these circumstances are equivalent to the Holocaust. But surely the dangers of collective blame and dehumanization are among the lessons we should have learned from it.The Holocaust has universal lessons. Of course it does. But those lessons cannot be separated from the particular history of Jewish persecution, or the antisemitic ideology that made the extermination of six million Jews possible.Kaufman’s questions deserve to be asked. But so much depends on the answers: Culpability for what? Complicity in what? Complacency toward whom?The Holocaust should challenge our assumptions, not become a screen onto which we project them. Otherwise, a play about the banality of evil risks confirming audiences in the certainty of their own righteousness.And that may be the most dangerous complacency of all.

The Perils of Ambiguity in ‘Here There Are Blueberries’

The Perils of Ambiguity in ‘Here There Are Blueberries’

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