Against All Odds

Abstract

More than eighty years on from the Holocaust, what Elie Wiesel called the ‘duty to bear witness for the dead and for the living’ continues to find literary expression. This year alone, a forgotten novel written at breakneck speed by an exiled German Jew in the aftermath of Kristallnacht – Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s, The Passenger, described as part John Buchan, part Franz Kafka – was unearthed and published in translation by Pushkin Press in London, while previously-unheard testimonies of Nazi ‘death march’ survivors have been transcribed to form the centrepiece of an important new exhibition in the same city.