Deeply affected by the events of Kristallnacht, he worked feverishly on what would become The Passenger, finishing a first draft in barely four weeks. In England he was able to publish an early version of the novel, which was also brought out in France, though barely noticed in either country. As an official “enemy alien,” Boschwitz was interned following the outbreak of hostilities in a camp on the Isle of Man, along with thousands of other refugees from Germany and Austria, as well as a small number of actual Nazi sympathizers. As the war progressed, male refugees, along with newly captured prisoners of war, were shipped off to various British dominions. Boschwitz had the ill fortune to be deported to Australia aboard the HMT Dunera. The passage was brutal, as the passengers were robbed and subjected to gross indignities regardless of whether they were Jewish refugees or Nazi sympathizers. In Australia the detainees were interned in a prison camp in New South Wales. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the authorities reclassified actual refugees as “friendly aliens” and so Ulrich Boschwitz was freed. With some trepidation he boarded the troopship MV Abosso bound for England, but that was torpedoed by a German submarine, and Boschwitz perished, along with 361 of his fellow travelers. He was twenty-seven years old.

In a last letter to his mother, Ulrich Boschwitz signaled his desire to overhaul the manuscript of The Passenger, noting that she should expect to receive the first 109 pages of his reworked version from a fellow prisoner who was on his way to England. In the same letter he advised her that in the event of his death, she should undertake to have an experienced person of letters implement these changes. Alas, his revisions have never come to light.

But what did turn up, some seventy-plus years after his death, was Ulrich Boschwitz’s original German typescript, in an archive in Frankfurt, thanks to a tip from the author’s niece. With the support of Boschwitz’s family, and interpolating what he knew of the author’s wishes based on what he had communicated to his mother and others, the German publisher and editor Peter Graf revised the rediscovered typescript. And so the novel finally appeared in its original language in 2018, under the title Der Reisende, and was translated and acclaimed throughout the world. This translation by Philip Boehm is of that revised original.