Nineteen Holocaust survivors attended Thursday evening’s preview of Here There Are Blueberries at Broadway’s Barrymore Theatre as guests of the production, four days before the play opens on Monday, November 9.
The play, written by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich and directed by Kaufman, is built around the Höcker Album, a set of snapshots kept by a Nazi officer at Auschwitz. Its pictures show the camp’s staff relaxing, singing and laughing a short distance from the gas chambers. What they do not show is what millions of prisoners endured there. The play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
The survivors attended on Thursday, November 5, in partnership with 3GNJ, a New Jersey group working to keep survivors’ memories alive.
At the curtain call, Kathleen Chalfant, who leads the company with Michael Cerveris, spoke to them directly: “To our honored guests, your courage, your resilience, and your willingness to share your stories are gifts beyond measure. We are deeply humbled by your presence, and profoundly grateful that you have joined us for this performance.”
The 19 survivors then stood to be recognized. The house, many of them visibly moved, answered with sustained applause.
Kaufman said: “Each year, fewer survivors remain to share their testimony. This play is about how we look at history, and the responsibility to bear witness. The presence of these 19 human beings was a reminder that these events are not distant. They live on in the people who survived them, and in the stories they have shared to the generations that follow.”
Gronich said: “It’s so incredibly powerful to share this play with survivors. Everyone from the survivor community who saw the pictures in the Höcker Album all said the same thing: ‘let people see these images for themselves.’”
The production filmed the evening, and its reel includes interviews with Kaufman and Gronich.
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The production has also scheduled a series of post-show talks, and on its first Broadway preview it brought historian Rebecca Erbelding onstage.
Here There Are Blueberries is in previews at the Barrymore Theatre, 243 West 47th Street, and opens on Monday, November 9.
