David Pountney directs The Passenger, an operatic exploration of the Holocaust and its devastating effect.

When two women meet in The Passenger – one a former prisoner at Auschwitz, the other previously a guard – the meeting immediately draws them back into the horror of the Holocaust as victim and perpetrator march up in a moral battle between guilt and denial, retribution and absolution.

The Passenger is based on Auschwitz-survivor Zofia Posmysz’s semi-autobiographical novel. Posmysz spent three years in the notorious concentration camp after being arrested working for the Polish resistance.

When Polish composer Mieczysław Weinberg’s re-imagined The Passenger as an opera in 1968, it was effectively banned in the USSR and only finally received its triumphant stage premiere at last year’s Bregenz Festival, 14 years after the composer’s death. Weinberg actually escaped the Nazi invasion of his homeland in 1939, but went on to suffer at the hands of Soviet anti-Semitism instead.

Learn more about London operas within the West End.