Zofia Posmysz

A German woman on a ship returning to Europe notices a face of another woman which brings recollections from the past. She tells her husband that she had been an overseer in Auschwitz during the war, but she has actually saved a woman's life.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg's powerful Holocaust drama Die Passagierin channels his and his family's ordeals of wartime and Soviet persecution, applying them musically to Zofia Posmysz's autobiographical novel.

Continuing its tradition of unearthing little-known 20th-century operas, the Bregenz Festival presented the first staged production of Polish-Russian composer Mieczysław Weinberg’s “The Passenger” in 2010. Written in 1967/68, the opera relates the chance meeting of a former concentration camp guard and one of her former inmates on an ocean liner years after the war.

A troublemaker returns to his home village, reigniting friendship with his former teacher and looking to atone for his wrongdoings.