Writers: Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich
Director: Moisés Kaufman
In 1925, the Ernst Leitz Company in Wetzlar, Germany, began producing simple, small cameras (LEItz CAmera, LEICAs) holding 35mm film, and put them in the hands of anyone who wanted to record their activities. Individual histories were thereby preserved for as long as the photographs were visible. This play opens with a Leica Model E spotlit on a plinth. This is a play about images and what they mean.
In 2006, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. receives a scrapbook of photographs from a somewhat mysterious US Army veteran. He found the album in 1946, kept it for 60 years, and now, at the end of his life , he has decided to share his prize.
The action of the play, staged by the Tectonic Theater Project, takes place in a laboratory in the Holocaust Memorial Museum. The actors portray archivists, diligently conserving and examining a huge trove of diaries and notebooks, love letters and memoirs. Their hugely principled and morally exact working methods are effectively and interestingly presented, their forensic work is investigated, the debates taking place on whether or not to display the photographs are engaging, and none of that – well acted, well staged, well written – is the heart of the play.
The archivists use Verbatim Theatre techniques to animate the letters and the testimonies the photographs evoke, a subtle sound design promotes tension and dread where appropriate, and a masterful set of screens and slides and video techniques presents and comments on the photographs from the album. And the photographs are chilling.
They are snapshots taken by an officer, Karl Höcker, an adjutant at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Pictures of the camp’s staff relaxing in deckchairs, giggling on a company coach trip, enjoying some well-earned downtime in the Solahütte, a chalet by the sparkling river Sola that flowed through the Auschwitz camp complex. The hard work for which they are being rewarded is the murder of thousands of Hungarian Jews in the last months of the war, murders that had to be completed before the advancing Russian armies reached the camp. They are the sort of snapshots many of us have taken on holidays and work outings; they are unexceptional, jolly, and they portray not a single prisoner. The function of the Concentration Camp in which they work isn’t just opaque, it is invisible, and the power of the play is to make that absence speak as loudly as images of atrocity.
We may be inured to pictures of the camps, although Auschwitz, by a huge margin the largest of them, is almost completely undocumented. This play seeks to address that vacancy, and to direct enquiry onto the very ordinary, very recognisable functionaries who enabled the camps to run. The debate the Museum has is between keeping attention on the victims, and not humanising the perpetrators. It’s a lively, focused debate, and is powerfully answered by the drama. The people we see aren’t monsters, but their actions are monstrous, and their absence of anguish condemns them without reprieve. The pathetic reparations visited on them after 1945 in no way absolve them.
The displaced horrors of Jonathan Glazer’s magnificent film The Zone of Interest echoes around the auditorium, but the scrupulous, impassioned acting of the eight-person company, most particularly Philippine Velge, playing the archivist who first receives the album and, also in the play’s finale, a survivor of the camp, brings home the dilemmas of objective historians dealing with a white-hot subject with more power and greater articulacy than that frigidly cool film can present.
This is a terrific dramatisation of a difficult but profoundly important topic, and it holds its audience rapt for 90 minutes.
Runs until 28 February 2026
