With his opera, completed in 1968, Weinberg fought against the suppression of the memory of the Holocaust both in Germany and in the Soviet Union. At the centre is Marta, a young Polish woman and survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp for women. In 1960, she meets her former tormentor, the concentration camp guard Anna-Lisa Franz, on an ocean cruiser. The opera confronts the whitewashed and incomplete confessions of "Lieschen" with the inconceivable violence suffered by the prisoners.
Mieczysław Weinberg, who fled to the Soviet Union after the German invasion of Poland, lost his entire family in the Holocaust and was later imprisoned as part of Stalin's anti-Semitic agenda, became aware of the novel The Passenger by Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmyz at the suggestion of his friend Dmitri Shostakovich. Based on the libretto written by Alexander Medvedev, he created a work that allows the most diverse worlds of sound to interact with one another. Shostakovich was enthusiastic about the opera: "There is not a single 'empty', indifferent note in it. Everything has been lived through and thought through by the composer, everything is expressed truthfully and with passion."
Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar
