The Passenger

by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

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  PREFACE

  André Aciman

  Berlin, just after Kristallnacht: Nazis everywhere, Jews being hounded, picked up, beaten, and arrested, their stores ransacked and vandalized, every Jew in Greater Germany now terrorized. Not a shred of humanity or shame left in this wide country, except in scant, totally insignificant gestures—the occasional tap on the shoulder, No worries, you don’t look Jewish, or the unctuous but ultimately malevolent Would love to help, but under the circumstance, surely you understand. Everyone—even people you once thought were your friends and partners—will fleece you or rat on you, or both, and if you call them out as the barefaced rogues they are, they’ll only reply with the one infallible curse: Jew! You’ve become a swear word on two legs, and your only hope is that no one nearby heard it spoken, because informants and plainclothes policemen are stalking everywhere, in trains, hotels, street corners, cafés. Anyone who looks at you is dangerous, and if he looks twice, you know you’d better scram; a third gaze can mean the unimaginable. You try to blend in but, as Otto Silbermann, the protagonist of this remarkable novel, realizes soon enough, you look most suspicious precisely when you’re trying not to.

  This is 1938, and World War Two hasn’t erupted yet, but everyone knows it’s coming, and though no one has the merest foreboding that what’s about to happen will turn Europe into a slaughterhouse, Germany has already started its single-minded war against its Jews. The death camps haven’t been built but concentration camps are already fully operational. Yellow stars have yet to make their appearance, but it would help, says a waiter to Silbermann, if Jews were asked to wear a yellow band on their sleeve to make it easier to spot them. Meanwhile, the German bureaucratic machine leaves nothing to chance: your passport bears a loutish red J, your phone may be tapped, and even if you have “Aryan” looks, your name instantly identifies you as a Jew. With the dragnet closing in, you realize you’re trapped and have nowhere to go, and as for fleeing the country, well, you should have thought of that months earlier, now it’s too late. Germany won’t let you out, and other countries don’t want to let you in. In the words of novelist Ulrich Boschwitz, “For a Jew the entire Reich [has become] one big concentration camp.”

  So you’re on the run, in a state of panic-stricken paralysis, holing up in a series of improvised but bungled hiding places. When you stop to catch your breath in some spot that seems safe enough for a fleeting few hours, the question inevitably comes back: why didn’t you flee when you could easily have done so? The answer couldn’t be more galling: because you thought things weren’t as bad as all that, because you continue to believe that this foul phase can’t possibly last much longer, because you cling to the conviction that Germany is still a democracy, not a madhouse. In Silbermann’s words, we’re “in the middle of Europe, in the twentieth century!”—not some backwater where laws are the whims of the lawless. Surely this can’t be happening.

  But of course it is, and Boschwitz mines the irony for nuggets of the darkest Kafkan humor, even as his not-exactly-lovable hero insists on living according to middle-class conventions that have long ceased to have any meaning.

  * * *

  When the storm troopers come knocking at his door, Otto Silbermann manages to slip out the back of his comfortable bourgeois home, leaving behind all of his belongings, while his Christian wife helps hasten his escape. He has a decent amount of cash, he knows his way around, he could even pull a few strings, and a number of people owe him favors. Besides, all this is bound to blow over soon: after all, he served on the front in the Great War, he dutifully pays his taxes, runs a respected business; in short, Otto Silbermann is a thoroughly upstanding citizen.

  Of course, the fact that he doesn’t look Jewish helps. When he boards a train, he is the sort of traveler who gives every indication of knowing where he is headed. And his fellow passengers feel free to engage him in conversation. A man with a Nazi lapel pin suggests they play chess, a stenotypist whose leftist boyfriend served time in a concentration camp confides her problems, and the estranged wife of a lawyer is happy to flirt with him. He listens to disgruntled miners and regales lighthearted soldiers. And so we, too, meet a cross section of the populace—“regular” Germans pursuing their everyday affairs, minding their own business, going about their lives with nary a care in the world.

  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.

  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.

  Boschwitz has given us the first fictional depiction of Jewish life in Germany in the final months before the war, a keenly observed sociological snapshot as well as an insightful psychological portrait of the protagonist. The Passenger is a disabused, prophetic, and flawlessly penetrating glimpse of what, in retrospect, was to be the unavoidable outcome of the persecution of Jews under Hitler’s regime. Boschwitz’s tale of an individual scurrying from train station to train station across a homeland that is no longer home could not have been more prescient of the terror the Nazis would unleash on every Jew. The author’s own peregrinations from Germany to Sweden and on to France, Luxembourg, Belgium, England, and finally to Australia could not have failed to give him a firsthand feel for Silbermann’s own desperate itinerary. What Boschwitz saw clearly enough was the utter despoliation of one’s identity, of one’s trust in the world, and ultimately of one’s very humanity: “They’ll slowly undress us first and then kill us, so our clothes won’t get bloody and our banknotes won’t get damaged. These days murder is performed economically.” How could he have known all this so early in the tragedy? Or, to turn the question around, how is it that so many can still claim never to have known what was done to the Jews in Hitler’s Europe?

  THE PASSENGER

  ONE

  Becker stood up, stubbed his cigar in the ashtray, buttoned his jacket, and placed his right hand reassuringly on Silbermann’s shoulder. “So then take care, Otto. I think I’ll be back in Berlin by tomorrow. If something comes up, you can simply call me in Hamburg.”

  Silbermann nodded. “Just do me one favor,” he said, “and don’t go gambling again. You’re too lucky in love to have luck in cards. Besides, you’ll end up losing … our money.”

  Becker laughed, annoyed. “Why don’t you just say your money,” he asked. “Have I ever once…?”

  “No no.” Silbermann quickly cut him off. “I’m only joking, you know that, but even so: you really are on the reckless side. If you start gambling again you won’t be so quick to stop, especially if you have all the cash from this check…”

  Silbermann stopped in midsentence and went on calmly. “I have complete confidence in you. After all, you’re a reasonable fellow. Still, it’s a pity to lose a single mark at the game table. And even though it’s your money at stake, now that we’re business partners I’d feel just as bad if you lose as if it were my own.”

  Becker’s kind, broad face, which for a moment had turned sour and furrowed, brightened.

  “We don’t need to pretend, Otto,” he said, now at ease. “If I lose then of course it’s your money I’ll be losing, since I don’t have any.” He chuckled.

  “We are partners,” Silbermann insisted.

  “Of course,” said Becker, once again serious. “And so why are you talking to me as though I were still your employee?”

  “Have I offended you?” asked Silbermann. His tone was part gentle irony and part mild fright.

  “Nonsense,” Becker replied. “Old friends like us! Three years on the western front, twenty years working together, sticking together—you can’t offend me old fellow, at most just annoy me a little.”

  He again placed his hand on Silbermann’s shoulder.

  “Otto,” he declared in a forceful voice. “In these uncertain times, in this unclear world, there’s only one thing that can be relied on, and that is friendship, true, man-to-man friendship! And let me tell you, old boy, for me you are a man—a German man, not a Jew.”

  “But I am a Jew,” said Silbermann, who knew Becker’s fondness for proclamations that had more pith than tact. He was afraid his new partner might go on expounding in his coarse-but-heartfelt way and so miss his train, but Becker was having one of his moments of feeling, and he wasn’t about to give up a single second of it.

  “I’ll tell you something else,” Becker declared, ignoring the nervousness of his friend, to whom he had opened his heart more often than Silbermann would have wished. “I am a National Socialist. God knows I’ve never misled you about that. If you were a Jew like other Jews, a real Jew, in other words, then you might have kept me on as general manager, but you would never have made me your partner! And I’m not just the goy of record, either. I’ve never ever been that. I’m convinced there’s been some mistake and that you’re actually an Aryan. Marne, Yser, Somme, the two of us, man! So just let anyone try to tell me that you…”

  Silbermann looked around for the waiter. “Gustav, you’re going to miss your train!” he interrupted.

  “I couldn’t care less about the train.” Becker sat back down. “I’d like to have another beer with you,” he declared with some emotion.

  Silbermann rapped his fist on the table. “Go ahead and have another then, for all I care, just drink it in the dining car,” he snapped. “I have a meeting to go to.”

  Becker first let out an offended huff but then said, more compliantly, “As you like, Otto. If I were an anti-Semite I wouldn’t put up with that tone. Like you’re some lieutenant barking orders. The truth is I never put up with it! Not from anyone! Except you.”

  He stood up again, took the briefcase off the table, and said, laughing, “And a man like that claims to be a Jew!” He shook his head with feigned amazement, nodded once more to Silbermann, and left the first-class waiting room.

  Watching his friend leave, Silbermann was dismayed to notice he was weaving slightly and bumping into tables, with the same stiffly erect posture he always assumed when seriously drunk.

  He’s not well suited to being a partner, thought Silbermann. He should have remained a manager. In that capacity he was reliable, quiet, and respectable, a very good colleague. But his newfound fortune doesn’t become him. If only he doesn’t wind up ruining the business. If only he doesn’t go gambling!

  Silbermann wrinkled his forehead. “His good fortune has made him unfit,” he mumbled, annoyed.

  The waiter Silbermann had been looking for earlier—without success—finally appeared.

  “Are guests meant to wait for service here or for the trains?” asked Silbermann, his sharp tone expressing his disdain for anything that approached slovenliness or exuded an unfriendly air.

  “I beg your pardon,” answered the waiter. “A gentleman in second class was complaining because he thought he was sitting across from a Jew. But it wasn’t a Jew at all, the man was from South America, and since I know a little Spanish I was called in to help.”

  “I see.”

  Silbermann got up. His mouth contracted into a line, and his gray eyes fixed the waiter with a severe look.

  The waiter tried to smooth things over. “It really wasn’t a Jew,” he assured Silbermann. Evidently the waiter considered his guest to be a particularly s
taunch member of the party.

  “I’m not interested in that. Has the train for Hamburg already left?”

  The waiter glanced at the clock above the exit to the platforms.

  “Seven twenty,” he thought out loud. “The train for Magdeburg is just leaving. Hamburg leaves at seven twenty-four. If you hurry you can still make it. I wish that someday I could go running to catch a train, but people like me…”

  He brushed a few bread crumbs off the table with a napkin.

  “The best would be,” he went on, picking up the previous subject, “if the Jews had to wear yellow bands on their arms. Then at least there wouldn’t be any confusion.”

  Silbermann looked at him. “Are they really so terrible?” he asked quietly, regretting his words even as he spoke them.

  The waiter looked at Silbermann as though he hadn’t understood him right. He was clearly surprised, but also unsuspecting, since Silbermann had none of the features that marked him as a Jew, according to the tenets of the racial scientists.

  “The whole thing has nothing to do with me,” the man said at last, carefully. “Still, it would be good for the others. My brother-in-law for example looks a little Jewish, but of course he’s an Aryan, it’s only that he has to constantly explain and prove everything, over and over. That’s too much to ask of anyone.”

  “Yes it is,” Silbermann agreed. Then he paid his tab and left.

  Unbelievable, he thought, absolutely unbelievable.

  After leaving the train station, he climbed into a taxi and headed home. The streets were full of people, many in uniform. Newsboys were hawking their papers, and Silbermann had the impression they were doing a brisk business. For a moment he considered buying one for himself but then decided against it, since he figured the news was bound to be bad, and almost certainly hostile, at least as far as he was concerned. He would undoubtedly be experiencing it all firsthand soon enough.