Hitting the buffers: The Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, reviewed

‘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 words, spoken by Otto Silbermann in Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s The Passenger, are startling. Not because they so perfectly articulate the obscene ethos of Auschwitz but because they were written several years before the fact.

Composed in 1938, after its author had escaped the more murderous developments of Hitler’s regime, The Passenger is a tense, nightmarish account of one Jewish man’s attempt to survive...