While his looks succeed in deceiving others, over time he begins to see he may simply be deceiving himself. A traveling Aryan speeds ahead, but as Silbermann finds out, a Jew on the run hurtles and jostles his way about, follows one alleged escape route after the other, but is basically buffeted about by an evil wind, and—if he survives the storm, which so many will not—he will likely wind up years later in another kind of camp, for “displaced persons.” Meanwhile here in 1938, Otto Silbermann is already displaced. And so he travels from Berlin to Hamburg, from Hamburg back to Berlin, then from Berlin to Dortmund, Dortmund to Aachen, back to Dortmund, on to Küstrin, Dresden and eventually back to Berlin. With each frenetic trip—in first class, or second class, or third class—he ends up shedding one more of the delusions that had protected and prevented him from recognizing the inevitable. He can no longer pass for who he always thought he was: “The truth is I don’t have the right to be an ordinary human being.”

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (1915–1942) was born to an affluent and secularized family. Boschwitz’s Jewish father, who had converted to Christianity and married a Protestant woman, died just weeks before the birth of his son. In 1935, following the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, Ulrich and his mother escaped to Sweden, where the young man wrote and published his first novel, Menschen neben dem Leben (People Parallel to Life), under the pseudonym of John Grane. His sister had already emigrated to Palestine in 1933 and settled in a kibbutz. From Sweden, Boschwitz moved to Paris, where he studied awhile at the Sorbonne, before moving on to Luxembourg and then Belgium. In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the war, he joined his mother in England.