After the Nazi takeover Clarissa Boschwitz deliberately embraced her Jewish roots and in 1933 fled Berlin on a night train to Switzerland. She joined the Zionist movement, and settled on a kibbutz in Palestine. Meanwhile Ulrich and his mother stayed in Germany until 1935, but immediately after the proclamation of the Nuremberg Race Laws they left the country and immigrated first to Sweden, and then in the following year to Oslo. There Ulrich Boschwitz wrote his first novel Menschen neben dem Leben (People Parallel to Life), which was quickly published by Bonnier in the summer of 1937 in a Swedish translation, under the pseudonym John Grane, and which received an enthusiastic reception in the Swedish press.

The success of that book enabled him to move to Paris, where he spent a few semesters studying at the Sorbonne. In The Passenger, Paris is also where Otto Silbermann’s son lives and where he tries unsuccessfully to obtain residency permits for his parents. Because this effort fails, Otto Silbermann attempts to cross out of Germany illegally and is captured by Belgian border guards. Evidently this scene, too, is drawn from the author’s life: Reuella Shachaf recalls family stories about how her uncle Ulrich Boschwitz was once detained by customs officials on the border of Luxemburg.

Many of the events in the novel can be linked to autobiographical or familial experience. As can the despair and hopelessness that overcame Otto Silbermann in the wake of the November pogroms. Boschwitz began writing The Passenger immediately after Kristallnacht, and finished the book in a feverish four weeks. An English version appeared in the spring of 1939 with the London publisher Hamish Hamilton under the title The Man Who Took Trains and in the following year Harper published the book in the USA as The Fugitive. Evidently Ulrich Boschwitz felt compelled to fight his own looming sense of powerlessness by writing, by bearing literary witness to the crimes being perpetrated in Germany and Austria—crimes that the world was treating with terrifying indifference or, at any rate, appalling inaction.

Boschwitz’s protagonist Otto Silbermann puts a face on the nameless victims. But he also mirrors the author’s own inner turmoil. Silbermann is not a completely sympathetic person—among other things he even scorns his fellow sufferers—nor are all the “Aryan” Germans he encounters as he vainly tries to outrun his fate bad people. He meets the most diverse archetypes of German society: those who bear active responsibility for the crimes being committed, fellow travelers, frightened people who duck and dodge, as well as courageous, empathetic individuals who offer assistance. This panorama informs his view of the country and the people to whom he still feels a sense of belonging.