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ABE WON’T BE SILENT - Last night, I saw a play called Here There Are Blueberries. It’s not about the Holocaust in the way we’ve come to expect — no gas chambers, no ghettos, no survivors recounting horrors. Instead, it's a quiet, haunting exploration of the people around Auschwitz. The staff. The secretaries. The photographers. The ones who turned a blind eye — or worse, smiled as they lived their best lives — while atrocities unfolded just steps away.
They weren’t monsters in uniform. They were ordinary people. Bureaucrats. Bank tellers. Chocolatiers. Paper pushers. Teenagers. Party loyalists. Citizens who chose denial over conscience. The kind who savored bowls of freshly picked blueberries from just outside the camp walls, while mass murder happened inside them.
And I couldn’t help but feel the pull of the present — the uneasy echo of 1930s Europe in our so-called enlightened democracy today.
Because while we argue about slogans and hashtags, we’re ignoring the obvious: Jews are once again being targeted from both sides. On one side, Nazi flags are flying at rallies in Florida and outside synagogues in Los Angeles. On the other, pro-Palestinian protestors — deeply misled — chant for the eradication of the Jewish state, a thin veil for the eradication of the Jewish people. Half of these hidden-faced wannabe peaceniks for Palestine don’t even know from which river or which sea they want the “freedom” they scream for — yet the ignorance is palpable and dangerous.
[SIDEBAR] At least the Klu KluxKlan have uncovered their faces. Frishe distinction.
At some point, these two distant, equally fanatical factions could — who knows — become strange bedfellows. The far-right and the far-left, united by a shared hatred of Jews — a people who, I hate to remind them, have survived every desperate attempt at eradication since the dawn of Judaism. Thousands of years before either of their zealot-fueled religions were even a twinkle in anyone’s (evil) eye.
And while so many Jews sit in our coastal cities, clutching their progressive pearls, partnering with enemies who would sooner throw them on a train in a heartbeat — hoping the storm will pass — they risk becoming no different than the staff at Auschwitz. Or worse: Kapos. Not in action, but in inaction.
We must recognize the slow erosion of empathy, the rise of dehumanization, and the normalization of antisemitism — not just as warnings from history, but, tragically, as part of the human condition. To believe “it can’t happen here” is to echo the doomed sentiment of the Hungarian Jews, who — in the final hours of the war — were rounded up and exterminated at Auschwitz, where the blueberries grew free.
The Holocaust didn’t start with camps. It started with rhetoric. With scapegoating. With neighbors looking away. With people insisting it wasn’t that bad. With a madman they glorified — as we are doing now.
This isn’t a plea for panic. It’s a plea for vigilance. For clarity. For our fellow Jews to stop arguing amongst ourselves long enough to recognize a worst-case scenario — and stop living in denial. No cavalry will be coming.
Here There Are Blueberries reminded me that atrocities aren’t only committed by monsters — they’re enabled by innocent bystanders. Though now we know: no one truly was. And right now, we’re surrounded by both.
This is our cautionary tale. Let’s not become the final chapter.
[Note: "Here There Are Blueberries" is currently playing at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, California. Performances run from March 13 to March 30, 2025, at the Bram Goldsmith Theater, located at 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA 90210.]
(ABE GURKO is the executive producer of a documentary “LOUDER: The Soundtrack of Change,” about the extraordinary Women of Protest Music streaming on MAX. He's an Opinionator who hosts a podcast, "Won't Be Silent," engaging in conversations from the edge of democracy. Abe is a contributor to CityWatchLA.com. [email protected].)
