Ulrich Boschwitz’s literary estate reveals a similarly tormented ambivalence to his native land, as can be seen in several poems penned in 1936. Lines such as: As long as there are German Germans, the country will again be free display a hopefulness that he had not yet abandoned. But there are also more bitter entries, such as “The Club of the Upright Citizens,” which begins:

True-blue eyes and trusty hands

double chins and strong broad chests

ready to receive commands

and march in good Germanic step

Another, entitled “The Legend of Joseph,” is devoted to Joseph Goebbels, and ends like this:

Joseph was a jobless hack

who scribbled here and there

and yet today—imagine that!

he is a millionaire.

Spreading his crippled soul’s infection

onto the German nation’s grand elite

he fashions history from fiction—

his work paid off—that’s no small feat!

These are all angry, if clumsy, attempts to express his contradictory feelings. There are also lines where he is clearly trying to buck himself up:

He who hopes will go on living

while he who sees no road ahead

has just given up his spirit

long before he’s met his death.

At that point Ulrich Boschwitz was twenty-one years old. A young man sitting alone in Paris, frantically writing as a way to counter the looming catastrophe. Death or Life—both options were equally likely, as he was very well aware. But before the curtain fell, fate had a few more twists in store for him, both terrible and absurd.

In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, Ulrich Boschwitz followed his mother into exile in England. Like practically all of the Germans who fled the Nazi regime, he and his mother were placed in internment—25,000 people on the Isle of Man alone. In July 1940, Ulrich Boschwitz was sent to an internment camp in Australia aboard the former troop transport Dunera. The ship was grossly overfilled; Jewish and political refugees were mixed in with German and Italian prisoners of war, and the conditions were catastrophic. In addition to the overcrowding, passengers were mistreated and robbed by the crew. The fifty-seven-day ordeal became an inglorious page in British history. Among the “Dunera Boys” were many Jewish intellectuals: one of Ulrich Boschwitz’s former fellow prisoners wrote a letter to Reuella Shachaf in which he described the important role that culture played in the prison camp.