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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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With Jewish New Yorkers on edge, Julie Menin says new protections will help keep them safe over High Holidays
As Jewish New Yorkers prepare for the High Holidays amid continued worries about rising antisemitism, City Council Speaker Julie Menin says her historic role as the chamber’s first Jewish leader has become even more important than she expected when elected in January.
In an exclusive interview with the Forward earlier this week, Menin pointed to her synagogue-protection law and successful fight against the Met’s John Galliano exhibition as proof that having a Jewish leader with a powerful bully pulpit matters.
“It’s incredibly important at this pivotal time,” Menin said. “We need to be standing up loudly, clearly, unequivocally in the fight against antisemitism.”
Many Jewish leaders see Menin, 58, as a check on Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose rhetoric on Israel and handling of antisemitism have strained relations with parts of the Jewish community.
Mamdani has met in recent weeks with Jewish leaders and visited the Orthodox-populated neighborhood of Borough Park. The administration was expected to release a comprehensive citywide strategy to combat antisemitism before the High Holidays. Mamdani’s spokesperson did not respond to an inquiry about the rollout timetable. Menin said that City Hall has not briefed her on its plan.
Services at synagogues across the city this year come against a backdrop of rising antisemitism. Synagogues already spend millions of dollars a year on security, a reality her children have noticed, Menin said. Recent NYPD statistics showed that in the first seven months of 2026, anti-Jewish incidents rose 8.5%, and 57% of the reported hate crimes in the city involved Jewish victims. “This has now become the new normal,” she said. “It’s terrible. It is just shameful that we have entered this new era.”
Menin is scheduled to speak at Central Synagogue, the site of an antisemitic attack last month, at its evening services before heading to a friend’s home, where she and her eight-year-old daughter will bring an apple pie they bake together as an annual tradition.
A High Holidays test
Menin said she hopes the Council’s recent efforts to combat antisemitism will help Jewish New Yorkers feel safer and more protected as they head to synagogues for the High Holidays.
One of Menin’s first legislative priorities after taking over the Council was a package of bills that included protest protections for houses of worship, a hate-crime reporting hotline, Holocaust education initiatives and additional security assistance. “I do see that we have made some real progress,” Menin said.
The most controversial part of Menin’s agenda focused on limiting protests outside synagogues. The Council ultimately passed legislation requiring the NYPD to develop a plan for establishing a buffer zone when demonstrations involve harassment, intimidation or physical threats. Mamdani, who had raised concerns about restricting protests, allowed the synagogue measure to become law without his signature.
The law now faces its first big test. The High Holidays coincide with the annual United Nations General Assembly, which is expected to draw protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, encouraged by Mamdani.
Menin said the new law should help protect people entering and leaving synagogues if tensions rise around Netanyahu’s visit, and demonstrations cross the line into intimidation. “I think that bill is really important in terms of making a difference to assure congregants of their safety and security as they enter and leave,” she said.
Asked directly what she would say to Jewish New Yorkers who remain worried about Mamdani, Menin avoided criticizing the mayor by name. But she also offered a pointed message about the political climate. “It is incumbent to ensure that the rhetoric is turned down,” Menin said, because there remains a “heightened sense of fear within the Jewish community.”
On Wednesday, Mamdani and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a lifelong member of Central Synagogue who spoke at services after the attack, announced increased NYPD security outside synagogues and other Jewish institutions for the High Holidays. Mamdani acknowledged that some Jews are “understandably afraid to come together and celebrate openly,” and said their safety “during these sacred days is of the utmost importance to our administration.”
The power to speak out
Menin has also used her position to speak out beyond the Council chamber, pointing to her recent fight over a Metropolitan Museum of Art planned exhibition as an example of the power of her bully pulpit.
Menin scored a significant victory as fashion designer John Galliano — who has a history of antisemitic remarks — bowed out following mounting criticism. Menin said she privately warned museum officials before the exhibition was announced that she would oppose it. She later went public after realizing that others who objected were reluctant to speak out.
“They might have been upset by the decision, but they weren’t comfortable speaking out,” Menin said. “We can’t shy away from speaking out. We have to be loud.” Menin called the development “a huge victory in the fight against antisemitism.”
A wish for unity
When Menin became speaker in January, she told the Forward that she hoped to use the position to help bridge some of the deep divisions in the city. Nearly a year later, she said that mission has only become more urgent.
Menin traced her own path into public service to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when her Lower Manhattan business was devastated. She later chaired Community Board 1 and became involved in efforts to rebuild the neighborhood. What she remembers most from that period, she said, was a sense of unity that she believes New York has lost.
“Right now, it just feels very divided and very divisive,” Menin said.
As she approaches her first Rosh Hashanah as speaker, her wish for the new year is for some of those divisions to ease.
“As we really focus on the issue of atonement, we need to figure out how we can ensure the safety and security of the Jewish community at this very, very difficult time,” Menin said. “It’s my fervent hope and wish that we can try to galvanize the community together, and that we can bring along many of our allies who are not Jewish as well.”
The post With Jewish New Yorkers on edge, Julie Menin says new protections will help keep them safe over High Holidays appeared first on The Forward.
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A Jewish audience applauded when this speaker called for Muslims to leave America. Here’s a better response.
A video from the Jewish American Summit in Los Angeles shows a speaker using wildly inflammatory, dehumanizing language to describe Muslims — as the Jewish American audience members stay silent, or applaud.
“I don’t want Muslims in America,” the activist Mosab Hassan Yousef said at the sold-out event last Sunday. “Get the f— out of the United States. Go back to the s—holes where you came from and reform your own countries.” Yousef, the son of a Hamas co-founder, converted from Islam to Christianity and worked for the Israelis for 10 years.
His words were horrifying. But the cheers arising from some in the room were even more jarring, as was the refusal of the event’s organizers and most of its sponsors and speakers to condemn Yousef’s hate speech.
As leaders of NewGround, an organization dedicated to building healthy relations between American Muslims and Jews, we know that the grief of Oct. 7, the days before it, and every day since in Gaza and elsewhere, is too much to bear. But we also know that when we choose to amplify or excuse rhetoric that dehumanizes our neighbors, we don’t just jeopardize their safety, we jeopardize our own.
We fuel a cycle of hatred that makes everyone less safe — including our loved ones. The impact isn’t necessarily direct, and it isn’t immediate. But it sets the stage for escalating rancor which can easily slip into violence.
Both our traditions teach that life is sacred. The Quran (5:32) and the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 4:5) concur: To take a life — or destroy the dignity of a human being — is to destroy all of humanity; to uphold that dignity is to save all of humanity.
When we sit silently or applaud rhetoric that erases the humanity of the “other,” we are participating in a dangerous, destructive feedback loop: You hurt me, so I must hurt you to keep myself safe. Circulating exaggerations, expelling our neighbors, silencing and deporting our political opponents in the pursuit of security will only leave us all increasingly isolated, vulnerable, and broken.
That is why relationships across communities matter, especially when they are difficult. Meeting one another, challenging false claims, letting go of our rigid certainty, holding our own leaders accountable and refusing to let fear define entire groups are not symbolic gestures. They are active practices to keep isolation from hardening into hostility.
At the same time, we need to confront those who deliberately exploit fear and misinformation to pull communities further apart. If we want others to stand up for us, we have to stand up for them, especially when hateful rhetoric comes from within our own circles.
That didn’t happen when Yousef made his vile remarks at the Jewish American Summit. As Louis Keene reported in the Forward, there were no boos, only applause. Afterwards, only two co-sponsoring organizations — the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Federation Los Angeles — criticized his remarks.
But our communities need even more than just condemnations of hate speech. We need a substantial, structural response. We need teshuvah — a process of self-reflection and return to integrity in which many Jews engage as Rosh Hashanah approaches.
This is not a theoretical exercise, nor a process limited to Jews. It is a human endeavor. The Quran echoes similar teachings — “Indeed, God does not change the condition of a people until they change what is within themselves.” (Quran 13:11)
At NewGround, we see this work happening on the ground every day. The people in our programs challenge one another. They engage in a rigorous, often agonizing process of naming their truths, navigating anti-Palestinian racism and antisemitism, and honoring the humanity of the person sitting across from them. They communicate through their disagreements — especially when it is difficult.
The recent shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego took place the day after our current fellows’ Israel Palestine intensive. Our fellows rallied around our Muslim community members, as they had around the Jewish fellows during our first intensive when news of the Bondi Beach massacre hit. Several of our current fellows and alumni mobilized networks in solidarity gatherings at Friday congregational prayers at the Islamic Center of Southern California and Masjid al-Thoir in Koreatown. Fellows traveled to vigils and to the mosque in San Diego to show support. After the vandalism of a mural this summer at the Pasadena Jewish Temple Center, NewGround fellows showed up to stand in solidarity, once again.
Real teshuvah requires more than just responding to harm. It requires taking steps to prevent harm from occurring again. It means asking ourselves: Why do we uplift speakers who stoke hatred? What safeguards can we implement to ensure we are not providing a platform for division? In pursuit of our own safety, are we inadvertently endangering other communities, and can we change our approach to foster mutual care? If we are not exceptionally thoughtful, we will undermine the shared society we seek to build.
The two of us have spent 20 years convening Muslims and Jews who can do the deep, courageous work of truth-telling and listening. We know that real change only happens when we don’t shy away from challenging perspectives, but instead dive deeper into them.
This work requires the courage to stand in one’s truth while respecting and listening to those who may hold opposing viewpoints. It requires the grace to acknowledge the anger and grief we all carry, and the discipline to channel that energy into building — rather than destroying.
We invite our community leaders, especially those who organize and sponsor meetings like the American Jewish Summit, to join us in this work. Stop choosing animosity. Choose instead to interrupt it. The safety of our children and grandchildren depends on whether we continue to build higher walls, or commit to building resilient bridges.
The post A Jewish audience applauded when this speaker called for Muslims to leave America. Here’s a better response. appeared first on The Forward.
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‘You would have thought Jews were being targeted, but no, Mom — It was America.’
Dear Mom,
The anniversary of 9/11 falls on Rosh Hashanah this year. It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years since you’ve been gone when you are constantly on my mind. Even though you’re buried next to Dad in Florida, I don’t need to visit your grave on the anniversary of your death; I talk to you almost daily. We had a special relationship, you and I, one that didn’t include Dad or little sister Ellen. We protected one another and shared potato pierogies and corned beef sandwiches even until the very end.
Mom, I cannot understand what the hell happened that day. In a way, I’m glad you weren’t alert and had no clue because you would have freaked out. I know you would have thought Jews were being targeted, but no, Mom. It was America.
I saw the planes go into the buildings and watched the towers come down. We ran when they told us to get out. You, thankfully, were at Village Nursing Home. I couldn’t imagine wheeling you up Greenwich Street fast enough to get away from that ball of dust.
When I returned the next day, our building was in lockdown. You wouldn’t have been able to go home. And where would I have put you?
I didn’t want you to be moved into hospice; I fought tooth and nail to keep you at Village Nursing. The staff knew you and had become comfortable with our family’s deafness and how to communicate with us. I wished I could take care of you myself. I knew what you liked, what you would eat, how to bathe you. But you couldn’t eat anymore, and I could barely lift you.
Every day after volunteering a few hours at Ground Zero, I came to see you. I hoped you would open your eyes or talk to me, but you lay motionless. Even when I lay beside you, you didn’t respond. You could feel me. I knew that. I watched you wither away day after day.
And now it’s Rosh Hashanah. I remember how you placed the scarf on your head, lit the candles and in silence, said your prayers. You always told me Rosh Hashanah was the time to forgive and not carry baggage into the New Year. Easier said than done, right, Mom?
I also remember how you would break your fast with a Hershey’s Kiss or peanut M&M’s. You’d hide them in your pocket and, when you thought no one was looking, pop one into your mouth.
On Oct. 6, I came to see you after Ground Zero. That night, I lay beside you and put my hand on your arm. You pushed it away.
I thought I was dreaming. I tried again. With all the strength you could muster, you moved my hand away.
I knew you were telling me to go. It was time to say goodbye.
I held you in an embrace and left.
Not long after I returned to my hotel, the nursing home called. You had passed.
Today, you would be wowed by all the changes and development around the old Twin Towers. I know you would still want to head over to our favorite pierogi place on Second Ave. So much has changed, but it’s still there.
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