Zofia Posmysz, 1923-2022

Posmysz, who died on Aug. 8 at the age of 98, used her experiences as the basis for works of art of rare power and feeling. She penned novels, screenplays, and radio plays, including The Passenger in Cabin 45, which originated on the radio and subsequently provided the material for a novel, then a film, and finally an opera.

“It is always painful,” Posmysz said in an interview in the New York Times in 2014. “But there are positive aspects, because it gives me a chance to deliver a message.”

Born in Krakow in 1923, Posmysz could not have known that she, along with the rest of Europe, would become swept up in the world events in the decades to come — and nearly a victim of them, as were millions of others. “Auschwitz — it was a colossal experience, a discovery of something new,” she said, speaking in Polish, in an interview with the web portal Culture.pl. When she first arrived at the concentration camp, she heard it described as a “labor camp.”

“I thought, ‘I’m not that afraid of work,’” she remembered of her own naivete. “This idea of mine was confirmed by the sign over the gates: ‘Arbeit macht frei’ — ‘Work set you free.’”

At Auschwitz, Posmysz witnessed firsthand the horrors that human beings can perpetrate in the name of hate and later spoke of becoming almost inured to them. “What did I get used to?” she told Culture.pl. “The terrifying screams in the night of people who threw themselves on the electric fences. Those were the people who decided there was no point in defending themselves, that they had to liberate themselves and they saw this as their only way to do so.”

Posmysz may have steeled herself against being shocked by what she saw, heard, and experienced, but upon returning to freedom, she made the courageous choice not to leave behind what she had been through.

She found employment as a journalist, a profession that took her to Paris. That was where, in 1959, as she was walking in the Place de la Concorde, she had the momentary sense that she heard the voice and felt the presence of the female camp guard who had been her overseer at Auschwitz.

This haunting episode triggered what became the radio play The Passenger in Cabin 45, which, in its later iterations as a novel, film, and opera, imagines the perspective of the former overseer, called Liese, as she happens upon a woman she suspects is her former concentration camp prisoner. “In the late 1950s, there were a number of trials of SS people accused of crimes,” Posmysz told the New York Times in 2014. “I constantly thought: If my guard appeared in court, what would her defense be? And if I were called as a witness, what would I testify?”

The story resonated with other artists during those postwar years: Director Andrzej Munk’s 1963 film version received honors at the Cannes and Venice film festivals, and composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg and librettist Alexander Medvedev’s opera The Passenger, which was written in the 1960s but did not reach stages until 2006, received considerable praise. “It is chilling to see Liese, wielding power in her official overseer’s uniform, trying to win over Marta by offering privileges, while maintaining that she is not personally responsible for the killing,” wrote New York Times opera critic Anthony Tommasini in a review of a 2014 production in New York City.

Posmysz continued to write and publish, receiving numerous honors along the way, including Germany’s Order of Merit and Poland’s Order of the White Eagle, but, above all, she was sustained by her mission to create art out of unbearable horrors. “Memory of this will save the next generations from such atrocities like Auschwitz,” she told Culture.pl, and her own admirable and enduring works assured that that memory would remain vivid.

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.