The novel The Passenger by Zofia Posmysz was the first literary portrayal of concentration camp realities and the Holocaust from the point-of-view of the perpetrators.
Mieczysław Weinberg wrote The Passenger in 1968, based on a libretto developed by Jurij Łukin and Alexander Medvedev from the Auschwitz memoir of Zofia Posmysz. Weinberg’s opera was never performed in the Soviet Union, as Soviet censors feared its possible association with labour camps and they accused Weinberg of 'abstract humanism'. The show was performed for Moscow audiences for the first time in 2006, 10 years after the composer’s death.