Polish writer and Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz-Piasecka died Monday at the age of 98. This was announced by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial on Twitter. The International Auschwitz Committee paid tribute to the writer and eyewitness. “For the survivors of Auschwitz, it was always a great comfort that Zofia Posmysz’s voice could be heard around the world,” said Christoph Heubner, executive vice president of the committee. With her literary works she was “a translator of the feelings and memories of many survivors”.
Polish TV news channel TVN24 reported online, citing the city of Auschwitz (Oswiecim), that Zofia Posmysz died in the city’s asylum on Monday morning. The writer and screenwriter was an honorary citizen of the city.
At age 18, Posmysz was arrested in 1942 while distributing pamphlets to the Polish resistance in her hometown of Krakow. After two and a half years in Auschwitz, she was deported to Ravensbrück. There, as a 21-year-old woman, she experienced liberation on May 2, 1945.
After her return to Poland, she worked, among other things, for Polish radio. She became internationally known through her radio play “The Passenger”, which was also published in German. The work is about the reunion of an Auschwitz survivor with her former concentration camp guard during a ship voyage. The radio play served as a model for a film and the opera by Mieczysław Weinberg.
The Bregenz Festival reacted with great sadness to the news of the death on Monday. At the festival in 2010, Weinberg’s “The Passenger” premiered. At that time, Posmysz worked closely with the initiators. “If there’s one reason I had to put up with National Socialism and cruel time in the concentration camp, it’s to tell those born later, so that something so inhumane never happens again,” Zofia Posmysz quoted the festival as saying on the occasion of the festival at the time Premiere.