He was born in Berlin in 1915. The son of a Protestant mother and a Jewish father, who died in combat in World War I, he emigrated from Germany in 1935, touring Sweden, Norway, France, Luxembourg, Belgium and, finally, England. After the outbreak of World War II, and despite his Jewish origin, he was classified as an "enemy foreigner" and interned in a concentration camp on the Isle of Man. Following the decision of the British government to expel all foreigners interned in his territory, he was deported to australia on the infamous ship Dunera, famous for the mistreatment to which the prisoners traveling on it were subjected. In 1942, when Boschwitz was finally allowed to return to England, the ship he was traveling on, the Abosso, was torpedoed and Boschwitz died, along with forty other passengers, at the age of twenty-seven. In life, he published two works under the pseudonym John Grane: Menschen neben dem Leben, published in Sweden in 1937, and The Man Who Took Trains, the first unedited version of The Passenger, published in England in 1939. Eighty years had to pass. for the novel to see the light for the first time in Germany, garnering critical and public recognition.