-Mark-Senior.jpeg?width=1200&auto=webp&crop=3%3A2)
In 2006 an album of photographs came to light showing the officers and staff of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz relaxed and at leisure in 1944, shortly before liberation ended the industrialised genocide of Jews taking place just outside the frame. This devastatingly matter-of-fact, documentary-style drama by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich for Tectonic Theater explores the ramifications of that discovery. A testament as much as a play, it is a stark and compelling piece of work and a bold statement of intent by Stratford East’s new artistic director, Lisa Spirling.
It opens at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, where scholars bend studiously over scattered desks. Rebecca Erbelding (Philippine Velge) steps into spotlight and tells us how a retired US Army officer discovered the album in an abandoned apartment and kept it for 60 years before delivering it into her hands. Almost no images exist of Auschwitz while it was in operation, she tells us: these 32 pages and 116 pictures do not show any prisoners or the infrastructure of murder; they show ordinary humans, not monsters, who facilitated atrocities.
Images of the water-stained, hand-captioned pages flash up on the walls behind her, followed by the pictures themselves: men in SS uniforms laughing; giggling young women eating blueberries; an accordion singalong outside a rustic holiday hut; a children’s Christmas party.
.jpeg)
The action – if that’s the right word, given that most of the play consists of calm direct address or quietly intense dialogue – unfolds as a detective story and a moral quandry. Erbelding and her colleagues deduce that the album was compiled by Karl-Friedrich Höcker, adjutant to the Auschwitz-Birkenau commandant Richard Baer.
It holds the first photographic proof placing Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who experimented on prisoners, at Auschwitz. Rudolf Höss – the creator and previous commandant of the camp and the subject of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which shares both DNA and a sense of moral horror with this production – is prominently featured.
But what should an institution dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust do with images of those who perpetrated it? How might survivors or their descendants react if confronted with these jovial snaps? And it is not just officers and guards who are pictured – there are doctors and “helferinnen”, young women who worked as clerks or telephonists. What does it mean for these people or *their* relatives if they are identified?
.jpeg)
Kaufman and Gronich, aided by dramaturg Amy Marie Seidel, meticulously unpick the implications of the pictures. Erbelding confesses that she wants to believe the helferinnen are innocent. Yet they came of age in a defeated Germany, groomed in the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth and certified racially pure enough to flirt with and marry SS officers. They signed chits declaring that prisoners were fit for enforced labour or for “sonderbehandlung” (‘different treatment’ – gassing). The Nazi machine operated through collective responsibility. Everyone did their small part: no one felt directly accountable.
Two of the most powerful moments involve Tilman Taube (Clifford Samuel), the grandson of a doctor seen in SS uniform in the photos, who takes it upon himself to contact other family members of camp staff. Peter Wirths (Os Leanse) cannot square the fact that his own doctor father saved 93,000 prisoners from typhoid but consigned many to their deaths. The guilt felt by Rudolf Höss’s grandson (Arthur Wilson) drives him to violent rages and a fear he is genetically prone to hatred: until he realises that belief in a deterministic bloodline accords with Nazi propaganda. Eventually, we learn what happened to Höcker, who died in a nursing home aged 89 in 2006 – the year the album revealed.
The eight-strong ensemble here performs with quiet, unshowy efficiency and there is an immensely powerful epilogue. Here Philippine Velge takes on the role of Lily Jacob, possessor of a second Auschwitz photo album, that depicted the moment she arrived at Auschwitz as a teenage prisoner and her family were sent to the gas chambers. This album, like Höcker’s, had to be made public, she says, because “time moves on, and we all live in the world”.
To 28 Feb, stratfordeast.com.
