A chance encounter in Paris in 1959 between a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz and the woman she believed was her overseer is the basis of an opera having its New York debut at the Park Avenue Armory during this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival.
The 1968 opera, The Passenger, with music by Mieczyslaw Weinberg and libretto by Alexander Medvedev, is based on what was originally a radio play by Zofia Posmysz, The Passenger of Cabin 45. The radio play was later turned by Posmysz into a novel, then into a television play and eventually a film, which was not completed by its director, Andrzej Munk, who was killed in a car crash while working on it. The film eventually was released, winning awards at film festivals in Cannes and Venice in 1963. The novel became the basis of Weinberg’s opera.
Polish-born Weinberg was the only member of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust, escaping to Russia when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. His mentor, Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, introduced him to Medvedev. Russian authorities censored Weinberg’s opera, which was not performed until 2006, ten years after his death, in a semi-staged concert in Moscow. It was fully staged for the first time in 2010 at the Bregenz Festival in Austria and at the Houston Grand Opera earlier this year.
Set in the late 1950’s, The Passenger depicts a German couple, Liese and Walter, sailing on an ocean liner, where Liese, a former SS officer, thinks a fellow passenger had been her prisoner at Auschwitz; she had never told her husband about her work there. In the opera, scenes on board the luxurious cruise ship are juxtaposed with flashbacks to Auschwitz; however, Liese never confirms whether her fellow passenger had actually been her prisoner.
Posmysz, 89, said on a visit to New York this week that on her first trip to Paris in 1959, while on assignment for Polish radio, she went to the Place de la Concorde and was surrounded by German-speaking tourists. She said, “Suddenly I heard a voice that was just like the voice” of her overseer at Auschwitz, “a high, unpleasant voice. I was in shock. I didn’t know whether to turn around and look, what to do if it were really her. This lasted a few moments. I finally mustered my courage, turned around and looked. It was not her.”
Posmysz’s husband urged her to write about her experience because he noticed, she said, “I must have been quite agitated.”
Posmysz, who wrote the script for Munk’s film, said that after he died and a friend of Munk’s wanted to release it, she and the friend decided to keep the camp material Munk had already shot, and to “fill in the gaps with still photos, and tie everything together with a voiceover narration. It was an unfinished film in finished form.”
Posmyzs said her overseer at Auschwitz performed dutifully and sometimes pretended not to see violations of rules by prisoners. “Perhaps there was something human in her,” she said, noting that once in 1943, she found the overseer crying, and asked why: The overseer’s husband had been killed at the front.
Posmyzs said that when she consented for the opera’s libretto to be written, “I was perfectly aware opera is an autonomous genre. Medvedev went a little bit farther. Our cooperation was very good. He used to come to Poland and I showed him Auschwitz.”
Contrary to some post-war depictions, the music of Bach was never played by inmates at Auschwitz, Posmyzs said. What was performed, she said, was “light music from operettas, Lehar, waltzes, not classical music or classical opera. And God forbid Chopin.”
She had several meetings with Weinberg in Moscow in the 1960’s when he was composing the opera. She said he “wanted to know as much as possible about life in Auschwitz. He asked about details which seemed unimportant to me, but when I was talking, he looked at me as if he wasn’t hearing what I was saying. He looked somewhere far away, beyond me, through me with an unforgettable facial expression. Looking at me and listening to my words, he was seeing something else, he was in a different world. I was confused by this.”
“Only much later after returning to Poland did I understand,” she said, adding, “I found out about his tragedy. He escaped the Germans in 1939 and was saved; his parents and sister were not, they were murdered in the Trawniki camp near Lublin. I understood then that when he listened about my life in Auschwitz, he saw his nearest and dearest, and he was living through what they lived through.”
