Among other things yesterday (like attending my 8 year old granddaughter’s birthday party), (a) I watched a presentation by Rabbi Professor (or is it Professor Rabbi?) David Freidenreich, Professor of Jewish Studies at Colby College, in Waterville ME, entitled “Making it in Maine: Stories of Jewish Life in Small-Town America”, and (b) attended the Shakespeare Theatre’s production of “Here There are Blueberries”, a Holocaust play showing another side of the Auschwitz Death Camp (in Oswiecim) during the Second World War. Two very different stories, both interesting in very different ways. The Freidenreich presentation can be viewed at http://www.habermaninstitute.org, under Program Recordings and, then, Videos. The Blueberries play can be seen at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington through May 28.

Let’s dig a little deeper.

“Here There are Blueberries” by Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich is an example of that rare art form, a documentary play. It tells the story of a gift, originally anonymous (for reasons explained in the play) of a photo album with about 130 photos taken at Auschwitz in 1944. The album was found in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt in 1946, after the war had ended, and was unique in that it didn’t show any of the inmates in Auschwitz, but concentrated on the Nazis who administered the camp. It showed them typically in uniform at official functions, and it showed them with family members and with female Helferin, young women 17-30 who acted as telegraph operators at the camp, at the camp resort, Solahutte. You learn that the camp itself was more than just the Auschwitz and Birkenau death and work camps, but also a residential community and a chalet-like resort, over several square miles of ground.

The National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington was given the photo album, after a discussion of whether it fit the mission of the museum of honoring victims and not memorializing perpetrators, and the gift led to a detailed exploration of many of the individuals pictured. It was apparently the only series of photos of this kind, showing the good life of the camp administrators, and it led to a significant amount of soul searching by the descendants of those pictured, as the play describes.\

Towards the end of the play the photo book of the camp administrators is compared to another photo book, found in an abandoned German army barracks at Auschwitz after the war, this one focusing on victims, not administrators, a book which found by chance by a prisoner in the camp at the time of liberation who is actually pictured, along with her family, in the album. Go figure.

The script (largely taken from interview and testimony transcripts) does follow some of those pictured, including the presumed owner of the book a man named Karl Hocker, who was for a period of less than a year in 1944, the assistant to the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, who lived to be 89, escaping the most serious punishment for his complicity in the Nazi crimes. His grandson features prominently in the play as a man who learned the worst things about his grandfather after the existence of the photo album was published by the museum in 2007 and who worked with the museum to track down and interview descendants of others who were pictured in the book.

The play, one act and 90 minutes, was well constructed, directed and acted. Although it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Nazi elite lived high of the hog, so to speak, the photo album does flesh out much of this life and is of much interest.

(Coincidentally, I saw this weekend that British author Martin Amis passed away. I quote from the lengthy New York Times obituary: “On the day he died, a film of Mr. Amis’ 2014 Holocaust novel, “Zone of Interest” – the title refers to Germany’s term for the 40 square kilometer area that surrounded Auschwitz – debuted to strong reviews at the Cannes Film Festival. Directed by Jonathan Glazer, the film (like the novel) is partly about the idyllic life of a camp commander and his wife, who live just outside the barb-wired compound”. Was this novel related to the Hocker photo album, which was given to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007? I don’t know.)

Now what about Maine? This blog post is getting long, so I will only say a few things and suggest that you watch Prof. Freidenreich’s presentation at the Haberman website. Maine’s Jewish population today, approximately 20,000 apparently, may be concentrated in Portland, but is spread around the state in small communities, and has been since Jews first migrated to Maine in the 1840s and became peddlers, and then merchants and junk dealers, and then doctors, professors and lawyers.

The stories of some of the early settlers were interesting, along with some of the issues surrounding education in the state. Jewish quotas at all the private colleges through World War II, Jewish exclusion from coastal resorts, the change from a largely Orthodox community to one that today is largely non-denominational, and the degree of participation by Maine’s Jews in Jewish life today. Highly recommended.

The Jews of Maine and the Jews of Auschwitz. How different can they be?