Superb Holocaust play on Broadway shows chilling images of Nazis at Auschwitz relaxing and partying

Ninety minutes, with no intermission, At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W.47th Street.“Here There Are Blueberries” is a risky title for a commercial Broadway play.

To the uninitiated, it suggests calmness and pastoral environs and doesn’t initially tell you much about what it’s labeling.“Death of a Salesman” does not have this problem.But that seeming innocuousness, concealing something much darker and more horrific, is what’s so powerful about Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich’s paralyzing show about the Holocaust that opened Monday night at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.Much like the film “The Zone of Interest,” it’s about how Nazis led happy home lives just feet away from the mass murder of Jews and other targeted groups taking place at Auschwitz in Poland.Midway through, a black-and-white snapshot of beaming, young German girls is projected onto the Barrymore stage.

The handwritten 1944 caption is “Here there are blueberries.” The chilling, unwritten addendum that we now know: “Over there is a concentration camp.”Kaufman and Gronich’s riveting docu-drama concerns a 2007 donation of photos to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.Much was unusual about the album.

Pictures of Auschwitz are rare.The Nazis didn’t want the outside world to know about the crimes going on there.Stranger still, these images did not depict the inmates of the camp or the atrocities that were happening.

Rather they showed smiling Nazis and their families playing games, relaxing and partying.Often they’re posing on beautiful lawns, or snapped at a nearby river.

The book was put together with care and affection by somebody who clearly wanted to remember that time in his life.Hard to imagine.On Broadway, the stage is coldly covered in desks with lamps and magnifying glasses, and different surfaces become screens.

Delia Cunningham plays Rebecca Erbelding, the museum archivist who is first presented with these photos, kicking off a controversy in her office...