By coincidence, Here There are Blueberries, the new documentary play by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich (conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman) has arrived shortly after Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest reached a wider American audience through its Oscar and Annette Hess’s German TV series The Interpreter of Silence arrived on streaming channels.

They are distinct works, but they have one subject in common: Auschwitz and the people who supported its machinery either directly, by administering genocide, or indirectly, by providing services and support to those who administered genocide.

The Zone of Interest focuses on the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig and their family and household. We never directly see the consequences of Höss’s labor, but the sounds and the smoke and ashes being produced just over the wall from the family’s beloved garden make it clear that only those who willed themselves to be blind and deaf could deny an awareness of what was going on.

The Interpreter of Silence, which is based on Annette Hess’s bestselling novel, is also oblique. The story is set in 1963 and focuses on a young German woman named Eva Bruhns who is hired as a translator for legal proceedings in Frankfurt. She begins her first session unaware of the true meaning of the testimony she is interpreting from Polish. It is only gradually she realizes she is translating an account not of a conventional business matter but of murder at Auschwitz. The scene of her apprehending the truth is extraordinary. As Eva is forced to translate details of a crime previously beyond her imagining, the brilliant Katharina Stark undergoes a metamorphosis wrenching to witness. It represents the violent loss of innocence that the children of those who followed Hitler experienced en masse as they came of age. Eva’s parents in Interpreter ultimately are revealed to share the complicity for crimes she is part of investigating. And then there is the matter of her finally understanding the drawing she made when a child of their home, a drawing that includes a stream of smoke in the background.

Here There are Blueberries deals with what life among the residents of Auschwitz was like outside of the camp. The action of the play begins when, in 2007, the archivists of the Holocaust Center in Washington DC acquire a photo album of snapshots collected by a Nazi officer named Karl Hocker of the staff of Auschwitz, their family and the people of the town attending ceremonies and amusing themselves during their leisure time. If you didn’t know who they were, many of the photos would strike you as not distinct from innumerable other collections of communities on display. But, of course, knowing who they are changes everything. These people lounging in deck chairs, playing the accordion, lighting candles on a Christmas tree, playing with their dogs, and eating those blueberries were also doing work that supported mass murder. Many of the other snapshots are of Nazis – names we still recognize today and the soldiers they were commanding – posing in uniforms at various gatherings.

There are no photos in the album of the victims. But we know they were outside the frames of these photos. At the same time the young women sitting on a railing were enjoying their snack, people were being exterminated in an industrial process of chilling efficiency. We have always assumed that the murderers of Auschwitz lived daily lives with the usual ordinary details, but these photos verify the assumption with specifics that illustrate Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, “the banality of evil.”

A co-production of the New York Theater Workshop and the Tectonic Theater Project, Blueberries makes a point of not raising its voice. Mostly the eight actors play archivists at the Center. But sometimes they play people confronting evidence of their relatives’ crimes. Blueberries always engages intellectually, but it reaches the heart when individuals have to make personal choices in reaction to what they’ve learned.

So, now we have seen the movie and the TV show and this play and the photos (and we can see them online — ) and we have an expanded impression of the lives of murderers and those who lived with them. What do we do with this?

Jonathan Glazer, accepting an award at the Oscars, said of his film, “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’” He went on to compare the actions of the characters in his film to the actions that are currently killing civilians in the Middle East. Many of the same people who applauded his film turned around and attacked him for suggesting there is an equivalency.