Paul Elliott’s review published on Letterboxd:
Director Andrzej Munk emerged as one of the most important members of the Polish New Wave, and Passenger was tragically his last film. It tells the tale of a coincidental postwar meeting aboard a transatlantic ship between a former female Nazi concentration camp guard at Auschwitz and someone who has the appearance of being one of the female prisoners she victimised during the war.
Munk succumbed to injuries he sustained in a car crash during the film's production, after he had completed a large amount of the principal photography, a great deal of it shot on location inside Auschwitz. So Munk's friend, Witold Lesiewicz, and other collaborators decreed that they needed to complete his film to what they imagined were his aspirations, and consequently assembled it using the completed scenes, still photographs and voiceover narration.
Towering over the film is an incredible performance from Aleksandra Śląska as Lisa Kretschmer, the former guard in the horrendous camp under commandant Rudolf Höss during the Holocaust. Her recollections appear congested with gaps and inconsistencies, which forcefully reflects the way memory functions. The story grows around a cycle of flashbacks, each one revealing a more unfathomable and complex perspective of earlier times by demonstrating multiple versions of events which itself offers a subtle analysis of issues orbiting trauma.