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In a forgotten 20th century masterwork, a Holocaust story from the perpetrator’s perspective
On stage at the Dutch National Opera, an elderly woman clutching a funeral urn containing her husband’s ashes stands on her balcony on a luxury cruise ship, gazing out at the imagined ocean.
She is dressed neatly in a blue dress with a red sash, and seems serene, until she catches a glimpse of a woman with long dark hair on a veranda below. Suddenly, she is catapulted into a memory, and a younger version of herself wearing the same dress appears on the balcony beside her.
The widow and her younger self are both Lisa, a German woman who holds a terrible secret. During World War II, she served as a Nazi camp guard in the women’s barracks at Auschwitz — a fact her husband, a German diplomat, did not know.
Seeing the dark-haired stranger triggers a flood of emotions, and Lisa is suddenly wracked with fear and guilt. She thinks she recognizes the woman as Marta, one of her former concentration camp prisoners. Could she possibly still be alive?
This is the beginning of Mieczysław Weinberg’s opera, Die Passagierin, (The Passenger), which opened Friday, April 17 at the Dutch National Opera and runs through May 2. The production, created in collaboration with the Bayerische Staatsoper (Bavarian State Opera) in Munich, where it premiered in 2024, is a modern adaptation of an opera that has been hailed as a forgotten 20th-century masterwork.
This extraordinarily powerful opera is by turns lyrical and overwhelmingly forceful, as it delves into the profound torment experienced both by the Holocaust’s helpless victims and their guilt-plagued tormentor. It presents Lisa with a surprising degree of compassion, but does not downplay her complicity, offering, instead, a twist at the end that reminds us who suffered most.
“You essentially hear mass killings, and later in the piece he shifts from such obvious descriptive writings and the music is much more a reflection of the internal world of the characters,” said Adam Hickox, the conductor of the Dutch National Opera production.
“It’s an illumination of Lisa’s internal world, then as we’re introduced to the prisoners in Auschwitz, an illumination of their experiences. You’ve got brutality and you’ve got sparseness and you’ve got lounge jazz, and all of this he puts together into one coherent whole.”
The Dutch production, directed by Tobias Kratzer, is only slightly changed from the Bavarian Opera’s version, with adaptations for the voices of the new cast of singers, said Hickox, including outstanding performances by soprano Sylvia D’Eramo (Marta), baritone Gyula Orendt (as her fiance, Tadeuz), and mezzo-soprano Jenny Carlstedt, as Lisa.
The first act takes place on a modern ocean liner, while the second act is set in a dining hall which serves as a set for the moments in the 1960s, and in flashbacks to a Nazi banquet hall in 1944, when Lisa is transported into her horrifying memories of the war.
The opera was based on a 1962 novel, Pasażerka, by the Polish author Zofia Posmysz, a Roman Catholic resistance worker during World War II who was arrested at age 19 by the Gestapo in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz. After the war, she became a journalist and award-winning writer and lived mostly in Poland, until she died in Oswiecim at age 98.
Posmysz came up with the idea for the story when she was a journalist on assignment in Paris in 1959, said Laura Roling, the production dramaturg at the Dutch National Opera. She heard someone calling something out in German, and she said she felt “nailed to the ground,” because it was the same tone and pitch as the voice of her captor in Auschwitz.
“What Posmysz did was to shift the perspective,” said Roling. “What if the guilty party were to recognize the people they have wronged, and what would that mean in terms of perpetratorship and guilt, and conscience?”
It was an unusual literary strategy — few novels had attempted to tell a Holocaust story from a perpetrator’s perspective; in the 1950s, the French novelist Robert Merle published La Mort Est Mon Métier (Death Is My Trade) based closely on the life and career of S.S. officer Rudolf Hoess, but such books were rare. Although Pasarzerka was very popular at the time, translated into more than a dozen languages and a Polish feature film, Posmysz received criticism for her approach.
“Trying to make a perpetrator into someone you can comprehend also makes them human,” said Roling. “It defies very clear black-and-white, good-and-evil boundaries. If you can say perpetrators were inhuman, they were monsters, that’s it. But we know that in reality they were human beings, who also did the most inhuman things. So it’s important to ask: How could they live with themselves afterwards?”
Weinberg, a Polish Jewish composer, who lost most of his family during the Holocaust, “experienced it as a duty as a survivor to somehow incorporate what happened into his work,” said Roling.
A musical prodigy, Weinberg (sometimes spelled Vainberg or Vaynberg as a transliteration from Cyrillic), was a musical prodigy who entered the Warsaw Conservatory at age 12 to study piano. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he fled on foot to Minsk; the rest of his family was murdered.
In the Soviet Union, Weinberg continued to face antisemitism; he was followed by the Secret Service and arrested in 1953 and accused on trumped-up charges, according to Roland, of a conspiracy to create a Jewish state in the Crimea. There was apparently no evidence that he was involved in any such conspiracy, and he was released after a couple of months, when Stalin died.
He completed his operatic adaptation of the novel in 1968 for a production that was planned to open at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. For reasons that are still not entirely known, said Roling, the performance didn’t take place. It was produced for the first time in 2006, ten years after the composer’s death.
Die Passagierin’s concert premiere took place in Moscow at the International House of Music. After its first full staging at the Bregenz Festival in Austria, in 2010, critics hailed it as the “rediscovery of the year.”
The Forward’s Benjamin Irvy described the satisfaction, in 2010, of seeing “a long-underrated composer finally receiving a deserved place in the sun.” The production subsequently moved on to London, Warsaw and Madrid, and later New York and Chicago.
During his career, Weinberg composed some 150 works, including several operas, 26 symphonies, and 17 string quartets, according to the Berlin Philharmonic. The composer Dmitri Shostakovich praised Die Passagierin for its “beauty and grandeur.”
Subsequent productions have varied in the way that they have approached Holocaust imagery. A 2024 version at the Teatro Real in Madrid had some singers in striped shirts with shaved heads, and others in SS uniforms.
The Dutch National Opera’s version leaves more to the audience’s imagination, with all the players in both 60’s fashions and contemporary garb for the parts in the present; the concentration camp victims are in all black. Creating that distance from the facts of the Holocaust somehow makes the scenes even more poignant, as one calls to mind the real horrors without any prodding.
Conductor Adam Hickox said that Weinberg’s music has, until very recently, been under-appreciated. “The fact that he was a Jew meant that he was under increased Soviet censorship,” he explained. “He did have a certain amount of recognition in his life but it was short lived.” Only in the last several years, he said, has his enormous output been recognized, and his work been revived and championed.
A certain reluctance to produce Die Passagierin may also have something to do with a fear that any art about the Holocaust was somehow taboo in Europe, and among first and second-generation survivors. For the first two decades following World War II, there was a general feeling that creating art about the Holocaust would not be in good taste.
“In the 1960s, both survivors and perpetrators were still around and, of course, dealing with their own histories, responsibilities, or traumas,” said Roling. Today, she added, “There are still a lot of family secrets or even stories that have been lost because the people you could ask are no longer alive.”
This Dutch National Opera’s production of Die Passagierin may give some audience members a chance to open up conversations they haven’t had before, Roling said. “It’s a way into being able to discover what happened, what did my family do?” she said. “And also ask a question: What could a person do?”
Roling said the opera certainly does not let anyone off the hook for their behavior, but it might give some people pause when they consider their own actions today.
“I wouldn’t call it a cautionary tale, but it’s important to remember that nowadays we aren’t immune to this behavior, either,” Roling said. “It’s easy to think this was a specific time and place, and it couldn’t happen again, but I’m afraid that’s not true.”
The post In a forgotten 20th century masterwork, a Holocaust story from the perpetrator’s perspective appeared first on The Forward.
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Remembering Abe Foxman, the longtime ADL leader known as the ‘Jewish pope,’ who always answered my calls
Friday before sundown, I realized that Abe Foxman had not sent me his weekly “Shabbat Shalom” message. For the past seven years, since we began texting regularly about Jewish and political issues, the message would arrive each Friday like clockwork — often accompanied by screenshots of Shabbat memes. My response never changed: “Good Shabbos, tzaddik,” using the Hebrew word for a righteous person that Foxman himself often used.
A few minutes after sundown, I texted him anyway: “Good Shabbos, tzaddik.” Then I turned off my phone. The message showed as “read” Saturday night. But there was no response.
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one waiting for Foxman’s Shabbat greetings. The silence said everything. On Sunday, the Anti-Defamation League announced that its former longtime chief had died at age 86.
I first started texting with Foxman after he stepped down in 2015 as national director of the ADL, concluding a remarkable 50-year run with the organization, including nearly three decades at its helm. By then, he had become one of the most recognizable Jewish communal leaders in America. He was nicknamed the “Jewish Pope.” Former President Barack Obama, a frequent target of Foxman’s criticism over Israel policy, said upon Foxman’s retirement: “Abe is irreplaceable.”
For me, a rookie journalist covering national politics through a Jewish lens, Foxman became an invaluable source. He was in the room with presidents, prime ministers and world leaders during some of the Jewish community’s most consequential moments. Yet he was always available. He answered calls quickly. He texted back. He spoke candidly. He could be sharp, direct and deeply critical when he thought leaders were making mistakes. But he was also compassionate, warm and surprisingly personal.
Every conversation began the same way: asking about me. My kids. How I was holding up. Only then would we get to politics. The conversation would often veer from Yiddish to English and back again.
Our last conversation was on April 15, after a record 40 Senate Democrats voted to block $295 million for the transfer of bulldozers to Israel and 36 of them also supported a measure to block the sale of 1,000-pound bombs to the Jewish state. “A broch,” Foxman replied, using the Yiddish word for disaster. “A sad time for American politics.”
That worldview shaped much of his public commentary in recent years. In interviews with the Forward and other publications, Foxman weighed in on rising antisemitism, campus protests, Democratic divisions over Israel, President Donald Trump’s rhetoric, and the Biden-Netanyahu relationship.
Foxman could be combative and unapologetic. Critics on the left viewed him as too hawkish on Israel, while critics on the right sometimes accused him of being too willing to criticize the Israeli government or American conservatives. But nobody doubted his commitment to the Jewish people and to Israel.
Foxman’s own life story
Born in Baranavichy in 1940, in what is now Belarus, Foxman survived the Holocaust as an infant after being hidden by his Polish Catholic nanny, who baptized him to hide his Jewish identity, while his parents were confined to a ghetto. After the war, he was reunited with his parents, first living in a displaced persons camp in Austria before immigrating to the United States.
Those early experiences shaped the course of his career and ultimately made him one of the most influential Jewish communal leaders of the modern era.
In 1965, after getting degrees from City College of New York and New York University School of Law, Foxman joined the Anti-Defamation League as a legal assistant. Over the next five decades, Foxman rose through the ranks of the organization before being named its national director in 1987, a position he held until 2015.
Under his leadership, the ADL became one of the world’s most prominent voices combating antisemitism and hate.
In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed Foxman to serve on the council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He was reappointed by Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. He was also vice chairman of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.
Foxman was often willing to challenge leaders he believed were wrong on Israel, including Democratic presidents he otherwise respected. He was sharply critical of Obama’s approach toward Israel early in his presidency and became one of the leading Jewish voices opposing the administration’s 2009 demand for a freeze on Israeli settlements.
In remarks at Foxman’s farewell dinner in 2015, Susan Rice, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and national security advisor under Obama, told the audience: “The thing I most value about Abe is his candor and integrity. He holds everyone to the same high standards, and I can always count on him to tell it to me straight, even when he knows I won’t necessarily like what he has to say.” In 2020, Foxman publicly advocated for Biden to choose Rice as his vice-presidential running mate.
“America and the Jewish people have lost a moral voice, a passionate advocate for the Jewish people and the state of Israel, and a remarkable leader,” Foxman’s successor, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a statement announcing Foxman’s death.
Foxman’s political commentary
Even after retiring from the ADL, Foxman remained a leading voice in Jewish public life, especially after the election of Trump in 2016.
Foxman told me in an interview at the time that the Jewish community should engage with Trump and hold him accountable when needed. He advised Trump to be cautious about making good on his promise to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He became more critical of Trump after the president said that there were “very fine people on both sides” in response to a 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In 2020, Foxman broke his tradition of not endorsing political candidates to back Biden. He argued that Trump was a “demagogue” whose reelection would be a “body blow for our country and our community.”
Once Biden took office, Foxman started to express doubts about the president’s handling of the U.S. relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He said it “sends the wrong message to our friends and enemies” that Israel is being held to a higher standard than other countries in the region. Foxman was also a harsh critic of the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul, warning that the right-wing cabinet ministers could hamper support for Israel among American Jews.
In 2024, he warned that Biden’s increasingly harsh rhetoric over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza would repel Jewish voters. “I believe that this administration, because of its political season, is taking American Jews for granted or has written us off,” said Foxman. ”If they’re worried that the Arabs in Michigan will vote with their feet, they need to worry that Jews can also vote with their feet.”
Most recently, Foxman was critical of national Democrats opposing the military operations against the Iranian regime in March for a lack of congressional authority. “Sadly, it is purely political games,” Foxman told me, noting that previous Democratic administrations conducted military operations without explicit congressional authorization. “Ninety-nine percent of Democrats are on record saying Iran is a terrorist state and cannot have nuclear weapons. So why this game?” he asked.
Now, as Jews mark Jewish American Heritage Month, that voice is silent. But for me, and for the many people still waiting for one more “Shabbat Shalom” message from Foxman, he will not soon be forgotten.
Foxman is survived by his wife Golda, his daughters Michelle and Ariel and four grandchildren.
JTA contributed to this article.
The post Remembering Abe Foxman, the longtime ADL leader known as the ‘Jewish pope,’ who always answered my calls appeared first on The Forward.
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Jailed Iranian Peace Laureate Mohammadi Moved to Hospital in Tehran
A picture of Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi on the wall of the Grand Hotel in central Oslo before the Nobel banquet, in connection with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize 2023, in Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10, 2023. Photo: NTB/Javad Parsa via REUTERS
Iran’s imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi has been moved to a hospital in the capital, Tehran, and has been granted a suspension of her sentence on heavy bail, a foundation run by her family said on Sunday.
Mohammadi, 54, won the prize in 2023 while in prison for a campaign to advance women’s rights and abolish the death penalty. She suffered a heart attack two weeks ago.
Her family had called for her to be transferred from Zanjan, northwest of Tehran, where she was serving her sentence and where she had been initially taken to a hospital, so that she could receive better medical care.
She is now at Tehran Pars Hospital for treatment by her own medical team after being transferred by ambulance, the Narges Mohammadi Foundation said in a statement.
Mohammadi was sentenced to a new prison term of 7-1/2 years, the foundation said in February, weeks before the US and Israel launched their war against Iran. The Nobel committee at the time called on Tehran to free her immediately.
She had been arrested in December after denouncing the death of a lawyer, Khosrow Alikordi. A prosecutor told reporters that she had made provocative remarks at Alikordi’s memorial ceremony.
The foundation gave no details of the bail arrangements or suspension of her sentence.
“However, a suspension is not enough,” it said. “Narges Mohammadi requires permanent, specialized care. We must ensure she never returns to prison.”
Iran shut down most of the internet in the country in January as authorities suppressed mass protests triggered by economic unease. Rights groups have reported ongoing executions of people involved in the unrest.
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Israel’s Attorney General Calls to Cancel Netanyahu’s Mossad Chief Appointment
Israeli Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara. Photo: Twitter
i24 News – Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara told the High Court of Justice on Sunday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to appoint Maj. Gen. Roman Gofman as the next Mossad chief must be canceled.
Baharav-Miara filed her position ahead of a Tuesday hearing on petitions challenging the appointment, telling the court that “substantial flaws” had been found both in the process conducted by the advisory committee and in the conclusions it drew. She said Netanyahu’s decision suffered from “extreme and blatant unreasonableness” and could not stand legally.
At the center of the dispute is the case of Ori Elmakayes, who was a 17-year-old minor when he was activated in 2022 by Division 210, without going through authorized intelligence channels. At the time, the division was commanded by Gofman. Elmakayes was arrested in May 2022 under espionage charges after two officers sent him classified information and told him to post it online as part of an “influence campaign,” despite not being authorized to do so. Gofman initiated this operation. Elmakayes was then held in full detention until July, spending an extended period under electronic monitoring and house arrest before the indictment against him was canceled in late 2023.
Baharav-Miara says Gofman’s involvement in leaking the classified information to the minor, “casts a heavy shadow on Gofman’s integrity and thus on his appointment to head the Mossad.” The attorney general also identified serious procedural failings in the advisory committee’s work. She notes that the majority members signed their opinion before committee chairman and former Supreme Court president Asher Grunis had written his dissent and before two members had reviewed several classified documents significant to the full picture. Grunis concluded that integrity flaws had been found and that it was not appropriate to appoint Gofman as Mossad chief.
The attorney general also says the committee failed to hear directly from Elmakayes or from a relevant senior military intelligence officer, instead relying in part on media interviews.
Netanyahu, who appointed Gofman to head the Mossad starting in early June, for a five-year term, submitted his own response to the court on this past Friday, arguing that the decision fell within his executive authority. The Prime Minister also said that his assessment of the matter was “dozens of times superior” to that of the court, adding that Gofman’s integrity was “found pure,” and describing him as the most qualified candidate.
Other coalition figures responded to the attorney general with sharp criticism, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Ben-Gvir accused Baharav-Miara of fighting the state, while Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said her position was “one step too far” and vowed to advance legislation splitting the attorney general’s role in the Knesset’s summer session.