Two terrified children huddle close to their mother, but Josef Mengele shows no pity whatsoever. "They stay here. You go over there," he sings, pointing to different sides of the train track. A soldier with a rifle then drags the children away from their mother.

These are the memories of a Holocaust survivor and they are being acted out on stage at the Bucharest National Opera in the Romanian capital.

The scene, which focuses on Mengele, the notorious camp doctor at Auschwitz, is part of the opera "Eichmann's Trial," the world's first opera about the Holocaust, the deliberate murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany.

The opera is about one of the most famous trials to have taken place since World War II, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who was sentenced to death in Israel in 1961 for his complicity in the murder of six million Jews.

Bringing survivors' memories to life

The trial brought the extent and horror of this genocide to the attention of a wider public for the first time.

"Eichmann's Trial" is part of an education project run by the Romanian Laude-Reut Foundation and is based on an idea by Tova Ben Nun-Cherbis.

The music was composed by the Israeli musician and composer Gil Shohat. The libretto is based on a play by Israeli playwright and screenwriter Motti Lerner.

But the opera also goes beyond the trial itself: The witnesses in the courtroom on stage bring to life the memories of those who survived the death camps — families that were ripped apart, women who were tortured, children who were shot dead.

An opera about the Holocaust?

Is it ok to stage an opera about the Holocaust? Should such a thing be done? These were the kind of questions Erwin Simsensohn asked himself when he first received a phone call, asking him whether he would consider directing the opera.

"It sounded ... strange ... a piece about the Holocaust, set to music?" he told DW just a few days after the opera's opening night at the Jewish Community Center in Bucharest.

Simsensohn is a well-known figure in Romania's Jewish community and also managed the Jewish Community Center a few years ago.

However, he says, his reservations dissipated after his first conversations with Daniel Jinga, director general of the Bucharest National Opera. When he then heard the music that had been composed specially for the opera, any last remaining doubts were swept aside.

"Music doesn't necessarily have to mean entertainment. It is not necessarily profane to stage an important subject in this way," he says.

A personal priority

The 45-year-old director is certainly used to challenges. Simsensohn divides his time between Bucharest, where his wife and children live, and Constanta on the Black Sea coast, where he is director general of the state theatre.

In the summer, he organizes a nine-week culture festival in the city. He also does voluntary work for Jewish organizations.

This doesn't leave much time for projects that are close to his heart, such as the opera about the Holocaust, which, he says, is important to him personally. Although Romania played a particular role in the Holocaust, it would appear that for a long time, no one in his native country wanted to hear about it.

What was Romania's role in the Holocaust?

Under dictator Ion Antonescu, Romania was one of Nazi Germany's closest allies during World War II.

The Romanian regime increasingly restricted the freedoms of Jews in the country and escalated violence against them. Jewish citizens were dispossessed and humiliated, deported to ghettos and labor camps in Transnistria, and tortured and killed in bloody pogroms.

Erwin Simsensohn's grandfather was also deported to a labor camp. Thankfully, he survived, but the Holocaust has left an indelible mark on the family's DNA. "That affects me personally," says Simsensohn.

While Simsensohn cannot forget the past, his native country long repressed, played down and in some cases even outrightly denied its own involvement.

It was only in 2004 that Romania first officially acknowledged its historical complicity in the Holocaust. Back then, a report drawn up by an international commission showed that about 280,000 of the 380,000 Jewish people in Romania and territories controlled by it died at the hands of Romanian forces.

Beginning to reflect on the past

Following publication of the report, Romania took its first cautious steps towards a culture of remembrance.

October 9, the day on which the deportation of Jews to camps in Transnistria began in 1941, was declared National Day of Commemorating the Holocaust. Plans for a Holocaust Museum were drawn up (but not, as yet, implemented), the National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust (INSHR) was established in Bucharest, and a Holocaust Memorial was built.

"For most people, it is not about remembering the Holocaust, but about hearing about it for the first time," says Simsensohn. Just two years ago, the subject of the Holocaust and the history of the Jews was introduced into the school curriculum.

A recent study by the INSHR shows that only one-third of Romanians know that their country was complicit in the annihilation of Jewish people in Europe.

Dictator and war criminal Ion Antonescu, who was instrumental in the murder of Romania's Jews, is to this day seen by the majority of Romanians as a "great patriot."

Devoted to the theater

Simsensohn grew up in Piatra Neamt in northeastern Romania. His parents are engineers, but — like their son — love the theater.

In high school, he founded a theater group, which quickly became a success. For his final project during his training to be a director, Simsensohn chose a theater adaptation of the book Born guilty, which was about children from Nazi families.

When he presented the project to his class, a fellow student asked him whether he was not getting fed up of the subject of the Holocaust.

"She said, 'It's as if someone in your family died and you keep the corpse on the table in the living room, show it to everyone who comes in and refuse to bury it.'" 

Although Simsensohn is a calm person, some of the rage he felt on that occasion is visible when he recounts the story. He inhales sharply before continuing: "I told her: 'I will put these people on the table in the living room.'" To emphasize his words, he brings the side of his hand down sharply on the table.

"If we bury these people, we forget who killed them. We are talking about men, women, children. They didn't just die. These people were killed because they were Jewish," he says.

The rise of the right

To this day, says Simsensohn, he considers it his responsibility — and that of other artists, too — to keep talking about the subject of the Holocaust.

"It is important, not only to educate people about what happened back then, but also to warn them about the dangers of right-wing extremism. Unfortunately, this is an extremely topical issue," he says.

Far-right parties received a third of all votes in Romania's parliamentary election in 2024. The strongest among them is the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). The AUR's presidential candidate, George Simion, made it to the runoff of the presidential election, but came second behind Nicusor Dan.

Something, says Simsensohn, has gone wrong. "Today, antisemitism is stronger than it was a few years ago. The threat for us is growing."

"Eichmann's Trial" was intended to be a one-off performance. But following positive feedback, it will be performed again in October.

This is a success both for Simsensohn and the entire team behind the opera because, as Simsensohn knows, the fight against forgetting is perhaps more important now than ever before.

This article was originally published in German.