The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

It is November 1938 in Berlin, Germany. Storm troopers are battering against his door and Otto Silbermann must flee his home. With a decent amount of money in his suitcase, Silbermann’s non-Jewish wife helps him escape down the back stairs. Synagogues are being burnt and Jews are being rounded up in the streets. Desperately trying to conceal his Jewish identity, Silbermann boards train after train in a panic to leave Germany, rather than face a possible life in a concentration camp.

There is a definite Hitchcock tension running throughout the book and I desperately wanted to love it, especially after reading some of the 4 and 5 star reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. But there was something missing for me. I did not think that Silbermann was a particularly ‘attractive’ character. Although he was Jewish, he didn’t look Jewish and at times in the book, made it clear that he didn’t want anything to do with them. Silbermann was also obsessed with his money. In fact, at the start of the book, he quite quickly chose to leave his wife behind but managed to flee with plenty of money. But there were some things that I did like about the book. The account presented by Boschwitz is a first-hand account of how terrorising it must have felt to be a Jewish person living in Germany at the start of the Nazi regime. As such, Silbermann’s fear and anxiety are apparent from the outset and for the most part, I was routing for him to stay one step ahead of the Nazi’s when he was going from train to train. I also liked the fast pace of the book which was reflected in the constant changing of trains as Silbermann tried to flee his homeland.

Whilst World War Two and the Holocaust are both subjects which interest me, I was expecting something from this book that it just didn’t deliver.

Following the horror of Kristallnacht, 23-year-old Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz wrote a first draft of this book in a mere four weeks, managing to publish an early draft in England, which was barely noticed. Becoming a prisoner of war himself, Boschwitz soon found himself aboard the HMS Dunera bound for Australia. Following the reclassification of refugees post the attack on Pearl Harbour, Boschwitz boarded the troopship MV Abosso bound for England, which was unfortunately torpedoed by a German submarine, killing Boschwitz and 361 others onboard. In a final letter to his mother, in the event of his death, Boschwitz expressed his desire for an overhaul of the original manuscript, stating that his mother would receive a reworked version from a fellow prisoner. Sadly, this never arrived but 70 years following his death, Boschwitz’s original German manuscript was discovered and subsequently translated.

Bewitched by Books Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️