Boschwitz
‘The Passenger’ a gripping drama by author whose own escape ended tragically
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This photo, released by Yad Vashem, World Holocaust Remembrance Center, shows Nazis carrying Jewish books, presumably for burning on Nov. 10, 1938, most likely in the town of Fuerth, Germany. The photos were taken by Nazi photographers during the anti-Jewish ‘Kristallnacht’ pogrom in the city of Nuremburg and the nearby town of Furerth. They wound up in the possession of a Jewish American serviceman who served in Germany during World War II. His descendants donated the album to Yad Vashem. The terrors of Kristallnacht and the days which followed form the backdrop for ‘The Passenger,’ a novel written soon afterward by German Jewish exile Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz. A new English translation was released in 2021.
Yad Vashem via AP
Every workplace has its snitches, its spies.
In our times, they’re the lurkers whose social media friend requests savvy staffers know to avoid at all costs, the sneaks who would rat out their mothers just for another pat on the head from management.
Now imagine the snitches are everywhere — your neighborhood, your city, your entire country — and they want you dead.
Not just you: They want to eliminate your family and everyone like you. They want to erase all traces of your existence, your history, your culture.
You can’t escape them at work, on the trains, in shops and hotels and restaurants. Some are obvious, some subtle. People you once trusted will turn you in simply because they can, or out of a twisted sense of duty to a government that has made you an outlaw because of who you are.
Leaving the country? It will take a miracle. Assuming you can arrange a visa, you’ll be lucky to escape with your life and the clothes on your back, because smuggling currency is a crime. If you try sneaking across the border and don’t get shot in the process, there’s no guarantee other countries won’t send you back.
These were the grim realities facing German and Austrian Jews 85 years ago this month after Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”), a brutal anti-semitic purge that shocked the world. It serves as the backdrop for “The Passenger,” a gripping novel chronicling one man’s desperate efforts to find safety and a fragile anonymity traveling the country aboard trains as his life and society unravel.
The fast-moving tale was feverishly written in a matter of weeks after the pogrom by a 23-year-old exile, Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz. It has enjoyed critical acclaim in recent years thanks to a recently edited version and translation into at least 20 languages.
‘I am no longer in Germany’
On the night of Nov. 9-10, 1938, mobs of Nazis and civilians looted and burned Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues. An estimated 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps in the following days. Photos show gleeful Nazis smashing windows, lighting buildings aflame and toting books away to be burned.
Kristallnacht was the opening salvo of what would become the Holocaust, a turning point from punitive laws and increasing harassment to widespread violence and deportations.
The passenger in Boschwitz’ tale is Otto Silbermann, a prosperous middle-aged businessman who begins a frenetic series of train journeys across Germany after narrowly escaping arrest in his Berlin apartment.
“The fact is that I have already emigrated … to the Deutsche Reichsbahn,” Silbermann muses darkly of his refuge aboard the national railway system. “I am no longer in Germany. I am in trains that run through Germany.”
For much of the book, however, Silbermann doggedly clings to his vision of a Germany where democracy and the rule of law may still prevail. He is, after all, not just a successful businessman but a veteran who fought for his country during World War I.
“Who could have imagined anything like it? In the middle of Europe, in the twentieth century,” he exclaims early in the tale, still trying to believe the storm will soon pass, or that his reputation and connections will prove his salvation.
Some critics have questioned the validity of Boschwitz’s observations, given that he was no longer in the country at the time of Kristallnacht.
Boschwitz and his mother had successfully escaped Germany in 1935, moving first to Scandinavia, then to Luxembourg, France, and Belgium. But what happened in November 1938 was no secret, being widely reported by international journalists who were still working in Germany — which did nothing to stop the persecution from escalating — and Boschwitz’s work feels true to other accounts of the times.
More than that, it stands as a warning to posterity about the evils of dehumanizing entire groups of people in pursuit of political revenge.
Decades of obscurity
The original German version, “Der Reisende” (“The Traveler”) was released in late 1938. English-language translations followed in 1939 and 1940 in the U.S. and U.K., titled “The Man Who Took Trains” and “The Fugitive,” respectively.
And then it disappeared. The book quickly went out of print, and Boschwitz died at sea in 1942.
He and his mother had landed in England in 1939, where the outbreak of war that September led to them being interned as “enemy aliens.”
The British deported Boschwitz to an Australian internment camp. He was later allowed to return to England aboard the MV Abosso, which was torpedoed by a German submarine in the North Atlantic. Boschwitz, 27, was among 362 people killed in the sinking.
“The Passenger” wouldn’t gain true international acclaim for over 80 years, until the release of a new version, in which the original typescript was revised and edited — with the blessing of Boschwitz’ family — using instructions the author had sent his mother, but which had never been carried out. The 2021 English translation is by Phillip Boehm, who has translated more than 30 works by German and Polish writers.
While not exactly new, the book’s message feels both timely and timeless.
I purchased my copy in May 2021, after reading the reviews. And, I confess, I left it unread on the shelf for over two years. In that respect it was like the hundreds of other books I’ve bought and never got around to opening — what reader doesn’t have a few of those, or a room full? — but there also was some trepidation. I was never quite able to work up the emotional energy to delve into it.
Recent world events, and coverage of Kristallnacht’s 85th anniversary, finally drew me back to the upstairs bookcase where “The Passenger” sat waiting.
While a gut-wrenching story, it was absolutely worth the read.
Descent into despair
Written with the urgency and passion of a young man himself embroiled in the unfolding tragedy at a distance, Boschwitz’s book nevertheless reveals a nuanced portrait of a much older man’s emotional descent from disbelief into despair and self-destruction.
Despite the situation, there are moments of dark humor, and a pervasive sense of absurdity which critics have compared favorably to the work of Franz Kafka. Blind luck frequently stands between Silbermann and oblivion. The question is whether he and his luck can withstand the storm — if he even wants to.
With Nazi thugs banging on the front door, Silbermann slips out the back door of his apartment thanks to the quick thinking of his gentile wife and a gentile businessman who was in the process of negotiating a lopsided property deal designed to exploit the legal perils facing Silbermann as a Jew.
Moments later the businessman, Findler, feels the brutal wrath of Nazi storm troopers who mistake him for Silbermann as their intended victim flees to parts unknown.
Humiliatingly asked to leave a hotel where he was once a welcome guest, Silbermann judges less familiar lodgings too risky and ultimately decides trains are the only place he can feel safe. Guarding a briefcase full of cash, he dodges many pitfalls — Nazi party members (and their wives) are everywhere — only to find door after door closed in his face. Exhaustion and disorientation put Silbermann off his guard and open him to increasing risks, including the loss of that essential briefcase, which is both key to his survival and a source of bitter regret.
While his “Aryan” looks frequently help Silbermann avoid detection, the condescension, callousness and hostility he faces from friends, relations and superficially friendly strangers reveal the author’s deep understanding of how so many in German society averted their eyes as the country lurched toward genocide and war. Some wanted all this to happen, others didn’t, while too many simply didn’t want to take the risk of getting involved. There are moments when Silbermann regrets his own behavior toward fellow Jews, but also moments of solidarity, compassion and bravery.
Silbermann is not blind to the dangers facing him, but decades of a comfortable, respectable existence also distort his sense of reality at every turn, until he is forcibly disabused of his delusions.
Boschwitz, speaking through Silbermann, bluntly prophesies horrors that proved all too true.
“They’ll slowly undress us first and then kill us, so our clothes won’t get bloody and our banknotes won’t get damaged,” he says. “These days murder is performed economically.”