After enduring three years in a concentration camp for his involvement in the Polish resistance to the Nazi occupation during World War II, he became an acclaimed journalist, novelist, playwright and screenwriter for his work on the Holocaust. Got Sophia Possmith passed away on August 8th. In Oswiecim, Poland. she was 98 years old.
Her death, a reminder of man’s capacity for immense evil in the city where the remains of the Auschwitz concentration camp are preserved, was announced by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum.
Posmysz (pronounced POCE Misch) was born on August 23, 1923 in Krakow, Poland into a Roman Catholic family. She was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1942 for interacting with fellow students at an underground university who were distributing anti-Nazi leaflets.she was taken to auschwitz, About 1.1 million people died there, the majority of whom were Jews.
She survived the atrocities at Auschwitz, but was later assigned to work in the camp kitchen and stockroom. In mid-January 1945 she was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp and her offshoot of it Neustadt Her Greve, where she was released on 2 May.
She returned to Krakow with 20 other women and lived in Warsaw for many years.
Her writing career began when she was hired as a newspaper reporter and editor. She did not ask for a byline on her first article on her war crimes trials in Nuremberg, Germany. Instead, she signed off with the identification number 7566 at Auschwitz.
Posmysz began writing for Polish radio stations in the early 1950s. While doing her job in Paris in 1959, she walked the Place de la Concorde among tourists. Most of them spoke German.
“Suddenly, someone appeared behind me,” she recalled much later on the Polish podcast Stories from the East and West. “It was my supervisor’s voice. All this time she lives a peaceful life in Paris.” , she recalled, that moment “couldn’t leave me alone.”
It spawned her most famous work, ‘The Passenger in Cabin 45’, later titled ‘The Passenger’. Released as a radio play in 1959 and published in 1962, the novel has been translated into 15 languages and is a film co-written with the director., Andrzej Munch and Opera.
The opera was composed by Jewish and Polish-born Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who lost his parents and sister in the Holocaust, and the libretto was written by Russian Aleksandr Medvedev. Conceived in the Soviet Union and completed in 1968. Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich praised the opera, but it was banned by the Soviet Union.
The opera reverses the moment in Paris when Ms. Posmisch thought she ran into a former Auschwitz guard. It tells the story of Lise, a middle-aged German woman who was on an ocean liner bound for Brazil in the early 1960s. Lise is accompanying her husband who is about to become a diplomat in Brazil. She is stunned when Lieze sees her fellow passengers staying in cabin 45. She thinks she may be Marta, who was an Auschwitz inmate when Lise was a guard.
It premiered at the Austrian Music Festival in 2010 and was performed by the Houston Grand Opera at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory in 2014 as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Ms. Posmysz sat in the audience and she received a long standing ovation when she was introduced.
“Weinberg’s music shifts boldly from depicting the lives of wealthy Germans aboard ships to the horrors of death camps,” wrote Anthony Tomasini in his New York Times review. “The protagonist of the evening, and indeed of the opera, was Ms. Posmisch. Her novel was drawn from her own experiences at Auschwitz.”
A list of Mr. Posmysh’s survivors was not immediately available. she was married Her father was shot by the Germans during the war and her mother survived. She also had her older sister.
Posmisch was one of the former Auschwitz prisoners who welcomed German-born Pope Benedict XVI to Auschwitz in 2006.
In January 2020, survivors attended a ceremony at the former concentration camp to mark the 75th anniversary of liberation. The event marked the rise of concerns over a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the United States and Europe and the growing conflict between Russia and Poland, which was largely responsible for the German invasion of Poland that sparked World War II. was done inside
Posmysh was unable to attend the ceremony, but knew that Russian President Vladimir V. Putin was attacking the Polish leader.
“I worry that as time goes on, it will become easier to distort history,” she told The Times. Because when you look at leaders, there is still a sense of dangerous ambition, pride, and superiority over others.Who knows where they can lead?
