Opa

November 13, 2026/3 Kislev 5787/Shabbat Toldot

Hevre/Friends

On Wednesday night, a friend gathered a few of us for the theatre and introduced me to the man in the next seat. I had no idea who he was. We chatted about the Laurentians and his plans to ski Tremblant this winter. Then the lights went down, and I was lost to the stage.

Here There Are Blueberries, a Pulitzer finalist, tells the story of a photo album mailed to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Its pages capture the off-duty lives of the SS men and women who ran Auschwitz-Birkenau. Picnics. Concerts. Christmas parties. Athletic contests. But outside every frame were a million Jews being worked and gassed to death. The play unravels the mystery of the album's owner to masterful effect. It forces us to look at these murderers laughing, celebrating, living. And it forces a harder reckoning still. We recognize ourselves in those pictures. We, too, picnic and sing and raise a glass. Which means the capacity to inflict suffering is not theirs alone. It is also ours. All of ours.

As the story deepened, so did the reaction of the man beside me. He began to heave. To gasp. His head dropped to his lap. He rocked in his seat. Was it a seizure? His heart? The waves came and went until the final bow.

Afterward, our group went for a drink with Amanda Gronich, one of the play's co-writers. My neighbour now sat across from me. Almost at once, he explained his reaction to the play.

His grandfather was a high-ranking SS officer. Think of the war’s most infamous killers. He sat among them. His grandmother was no bystander. Their neighbours and friends read like a roster of Nazi war criminals.

His grandfather was never pursued. Never tried. Went on to become a hugely successful German businessman. Never hid his wartime service. But like most German families, they never spoke of it.

The man sitting across from me opened a folder of photos on his phone: wartime images of his grandfather, pulled from the internet. The folder was labelled "Opa." It could have said "Zaidie." That is who this man was to him. A grandfather who showered him with love. And who left him a burden too heavy to set down.

It isn't guilt. He himself has done no wrong. It is shame, yes. But it is something heavier, and more terrifying. It is knowing that a man he loved, whose blood runs through his veins, whose choices made his very life possible, was capable of such atrocities. And knowing that what stands between him and his grandfather’s capacity for evil is nothing but the choices he makes for himself.

We rarely let ourselves see a burden like his. Our hearts rightly break for those murdered in the Shoah, for the survivors, for the children and grandchildren who carry trauma's long inheritance. We are trained, emotionally and spiritually, to stand with the victims. Never to look too long at their killers. But the hardest, most necessary lesson of this play is not how "other" these perpetrators were. It is how ordinary. Not demons. People. Like us.

In this week's parashah, Toldot, Jacob dresses up as his brother at his mother's urging, hoping to steal his father's blessing. Isaac, suspicious but fooled, does indeed bless him. But it is a blessing of dew and grain and dominion, not of the covenant, which is what he sought. The covenantal blessing of Abraham comes only later, when Jacob stands before his father as himself.

We can wear many uniforms over a lifetime. We can masquerade as someone we’re not. But we cannot hide from who we are. Our capacity for virtue is real. So is our capacity for vice. And the only blessing that is truly ours comes when we stand, undisguised, and choose.

That album is not a relic. It is a mirror.

Shabbat Shalom,

Dini