Fifteen years after the end of World War II, Lisa and her husband Walter travel by ship from Germany to Brazil to start a new life. The positive mood of their departure together is abruptly disrupted when Lisa notices a passenger who reminds her of the darkest chapter in her past. Lisa confesses to her husband that she was a guard at the
concentration camp Auschwitz from 1943 to 1944. The passenger reminds Lisa of Marta, who was in a concentration camp at the time, whose story now comes back to life for her in dreamy images.

In 1962, Polish resistance fighter and concentration camp survivor Zofia Posmysz (1923-2022) created her autobiographical novel The Passenger a gripping contemporary testimony to the Holocaust. In 1968,
Polish-Jewish composer Mieczysław Weinberg set this material to music for soloists, choir and large symphony orchestra. However, a staged performance failed to materialise. Only in 2010 did the world premiere of this haunting memorial against veiling and forgetting take place at the Bregenzer Festspiele.