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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.
