The Hoecker Album and Rebecca Erbelding

One of the great conundrums of Holocaust historiography is that some of the documents aren’t “about” the Holocaust. That is most certainly true of the Hoecker Album, a sheaf of photographs assembled by Karl Hoecker, the adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz Birkenau. It shows us nothing about murder in the camp, the numbers killed, the organization of slave labor.

It is, instead, a kind of vacation album. The nazis (spelling intentional) maintained a bucolic retreat center some kilometers away from Auschwitz. It was a favored spot for high officials and those who served them at lower levels. These were mostly young German women who experienced the death camp as part of a great adventure, their first foray into the wide world beyond home. The images portray communal singing and greedy snacking on seasonal fruit. It’s a portrait of heartless compartmentalization. Just miles away, in the crematoria, an entire civilization was being consumed in the flames.

The young scholar who brought the Hoecker Album to public attention was Rebecca Erbelding, PhD. Years after pledging herself to a career in Holocaust scholarship as a Girl Scout, she was chosen as an archivist at the United State Holocaust Memorial Museem. There she meticulously parsed the images in the album and assembled a body of analysis and interpretation. Ultimately, it became the foundation for Here There Are Blueberries, the Pulitzer-nominated play about the photographs. It’s a piercing piece that searches the depths of complicity and sheds new light on how “normals” accommodate perversion.

I’m privileged to bring you word that Dr. Erbelding will be in Tulsa this coming Tuesday evening, April 14, as part of the annual Interfaith Holocaust Commemoration. It’s at the Synagogue (17th and Peoria) at 7:00 p.m. The theme this year is “New Reflections: How America Reckoned with the Rise of Nazism.”

I know that she will have a great deal to say. She is a young, authoritative scholar whom you may already have seen in “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” the Ken Burns masterwork on the war against the Jews. She is a new voice in this field, exploring fresh avenues of storytelling. The event is free and open to the public. I look forward to seeing many of you there.