In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, I have a column about Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s opera “The Passenger,” a Holocaust drama that was completed in 1968 but had its stage première only last year, at the Bregenz Festival, in Austria. A Blu-ray video of the première production is available from the German label Neos; performances are imminent at the English National Opera, and the Lincoln Center Festival plans to stage the work in a future season. Weinberg, a friend and follower of Shostakovich, died in partial obscurity in 1996, but his music is undergoing a revival, with recordings arriving regularly from the Chandos, cpo, and Neos labels. As a point of departure, I'd recommend a superb disc of Weinberg’s Clarinet Sonata, “Jewish Songs,” and Piano Quintet, with members of the Arc Ensemble. The British musicologist David Fanning has written a short book about the composer, with an expanded version to follow in a couple of years.
The story of “The Passenger”—in which a former Auschwitz guard, travelling on an ocean liner with her husband, sees a fellow passenger whom she believes to be an ex-prisoner of the camp—comes from a 1959 radio play by the Polish writer Zofia Posmysz, herself an Auschwitz survivor. In the German video above, Posmysz recounts the origins of the story: in the Place de la Concorde, in 1959, she heard a voice that sounded like that of a female Auschwitz guard, and looked all around for the woman. She realized that it was a case of mistaken identity, but couldn’t stop thinking about the idea of such an encounter. Her radio play was titled “Pasazerka z kabiny 45,” or “Passenger in Cabin 45”; you can hear an excerpt at Polish Radio. The following year, “The Passenger” became a television play under the direction of Andrzej Munk, who then set about making a feature film, shooting extensively in Auschwitz. Tragically, he was killed in a car accident in the middle of the project, and in 1963 his work was shown in fragmentary form, with still photographs and narration substituting for the ocean-liner sequences. Posmysz co-wrote the script, and at a time when it appeared as though Munk’s film would never be released she wrote a short novel, “The Passenger,” which became the basis for Weinberg’s opera. There is, alas, no English translation of the book. Having made my way through the German version, I believe that it deserves wider exposure; it’s a subtle, ambiguous tale, in which Posmysz imagines the world as her captors saw it.
Happily, Posmysz is still among us, having celebrated her eighty-eighth birthday last week. On my blog, you can see a picture of her wearing a medallion that was given to her by a Polish officer named Tadeusz Paulone. It shows Christ’s head and is marked “Oswiecim 1943.” (Posmysz is not Jewish, and Jews do not play a large role in “The Passenger,” but the opera has a Jewish character named Hannah, who is given some intensely lyrical music. Weinberg lost his parents and sister in the Holocaust.) The picture was sent to me by Aleksander Laskowski, who translated my book “The Rest Is Noise” into Polish, and who knows Posmysz well. Laskowski told me that much of “The Passenger” depicts real people and real events. Lisa, the guard, is Annelise Franz, who, among other things, managed the kitchen at Birkenau. Marta, whom Lisa thinks she sees on the ship, is based on Marta Sawicka and Posmysz herself. And Tadeusz, Marta’s fiancé, is, of couse, inspired by Paulone, who was executed in 1943. The medallion that Paulone gave to Posmysz was made illegally in the camp; she variously hid it in a crevice and kept it in her hair. She was wearing it the night Weinberg’s opera finally had its première in Bregenz.
The most remarkable scene of Munk’s “The Passenger” is one in which the male camp orchestra gives a performance for the commandant, his officers, and some of the inmates. While the slow movement of Bach’s E-Major Violin Concerto is playing, Tadeusz inches closer to Marta in the crowd of prisoners and succeeds in passing along to her a memento—the medallion around his neck. I asked, through Alek Laskowski, whether such an incident really occured. Posmysz replied:
I also wanted to know whether Posmysz knew Alma Rosé, the niece of Gustav Mahler, who directed the female orchestra at Auschwitz-Birkenau and elicited performances of astounding quality. Posmysz replied: “I remember Alma Rosé quite well. She conducted all these concerts. As I worked in the kitchen as a Schreiberin [secretary], I was allowed to walk around the camp (others were not), so I could also sneak in the orchestral block and listen to their rehearsals and evening concerts, where they played all sorts of music. A few times I smuggled some food for Alma Rosé. She was a very nice person.” Rosé’s story is told in Richard Newman and Karen Kirtley’s book “Alma Rosé: Vienna to Auschwitz.” She died in 1944, seemingly of botulism. In the literature of the Holocaust there are few episodes as unsettling as the report of how Josef Mengele, the “angel of death,” came to the women’s camp to consult on Rosé’s case, in an apparent attempt to save her life.
