Zofia Posmysz, who endured three years of imprisonment in focus camps for associating with the Polish resistance to Nazi occupation in World War II, then gained approval for her works on the Holocaust as a journalist, novelist, playwright and screenwriter, died on Aug. 8 in Oswiecim, Poland. She was 98.
Her loss of life, within the metropolis the place the remnants of the Auschwitz focus camp have been preserved as a reminder of people’ capability for unfathomable evil, was introduced by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
Ms. Posmysz (pronounced POCE-mish) was born on Aug. 23, 1923, in Krakow, Poland, right into a Roman Catholic household. She was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1942 for associating with fellow college students at an underground college who have been passing out anti-Nazi leaflets. She was taken to Auschwitz, the place some 1.1 million folks, a overwhelming majority of them Jews, would perish.
She survived brutality at Auschwitz however was later assigned to work on the camp’s kitchen and stockroom. In mid-January 1945, she was transferred to the Ravensbrück focus camp and its offshoot Neustadt Glewe, from which she was liberated on May 2.
With 20 different ladies, she walked again to Krakow and lived for a few years in Warsaw, the place she had an older sister.
Her writing profession started when she was employed as a newspaper reporter and editor. She didn’t search a byline for her first article, an account of the struggle crimes trials in Nuremberg, Germany. Instead, she signed off together with her identification quantity at Auschwitz: 7566.
Ms. Posmysz started writing for Polish radio within the early Nineteen Fifties. While on project in Paris in 1959, she walked within the Place de la Concorde amongst vacationers, lots of them talking German.
“Suddenly, someone appeared behind me,” she recalled lengthy afterward on “Stories From the Eastern West,” a Polish podcast. “It was the voice of my overseer. All this time she’s been living a peaceful life in Paris.” She rapidly realized that the girl was not, the truth is, her former guard at Auschwitz, however that second “just wouldn’t leave me alone,” she recalled.
It spawned her best-known work, “The Passenger in Cabin 45,” later titled “The Passenger.” It was launched as a radio play in 1959, a novel revealed in 1962 that was translated into 15 languages, a movement image, through which she collaborated on the script with the director, Andrzej Munk, and an opera.
The opera was composed by the Polish-born Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who was Jewish and had misplaced his mother and father and a sister within the Holocaust, whereas the libretto was written by Alexander Medvedev, a Russian. It was conceived within the Soviet Union and accomplished in 1968; the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich praised the opera, but it surely was banned by the Soviets.
The opera reverses the second in Paris when Ms. Posmysz thought she had stumble upon her former Auschwitz guard. It tells of Liese, a middle-aged German girl who’s aboard an ocean liner sure for Brazil within the early Sixties, accompanying her husband, who’s about to take up a diplomatic publish there. Liese is shocked to see a fellow passenger who’s staying in Cabin 45. She thinks it may be Marta, who was an inmate at Auschwitz when Liese was her guard.
It premiered at an Austrian music competition in 2010 and was carried out by the Houston Grand Opera on the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan in 2014 as a part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Ms. Posmysz sat within the viewers and acquired a chronic ovation when she was launched.
“Weinberg’s music daringly shifts from depicting the life of the well-heeled Germans aboard the ship to the horrors of the death camp,” Anthony Tommasini wrote in his evaluate for The New York Times. “The hero of the evening and, truly, of the opera, was Ms. Posmysz, whose novel was drawn from her own experiences at Auschwitz.”
A list of Ms. Posmysz’s survivors was not instantly out there. She was married. Her father was shot and killed by Germans through the struggle, which her mom survived. She additionally had an older sister.
Ms. Posmysz was amongst former Auschwitz prisoners who welcomed the German-born Pope Benedict XVI throughout his go to there in 2006.
In January 2020, the survivors attended a ceremony on the former loss of life camp for the seventy fifth anniversary of its liberation. The occasion got here amid rising concern over a resurgence of antisemitism within the United States and Europe, in addition to rising acrimony between Russia and Poland over who bore a significant share of accountability for Germany’s invasion of Poland, touching off World War II.
Ms. Posmysz was unable to attend the ceremony, however she was conscious of assaults on Polish leaders by Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.
“I fear that over time, it will become easier to distort history,” she instructed The Times then. “I can never say it will never happen again, because when you look at some leaders of today, those dangerous ambitions, pride and sense of being better than others are still in play. Who knows where they can lead?”