The fall of Paris to the Nazis in 1940 foretold a disastrous fate for the European continent. European citizens who had sought refuge in France found themselves trapped between Hitler's forces from the east and Franco's government from the west. The only way out was to sail the unpredictable waters of the Atlantic to seek asylum in America. But the maritime adventure did not involve the greatest of challenges. Thousands of refugees would not be able to escape the war because they did not have a transit visa. The hope of the exiles was encrypted in that piece of paper, almost impossible to obtain and, in itself, only part of a larger bureaucratic plot that involved endless queues at consulates, inflexible officials, bail, reservations, certificates, permits and absurd expiration dates. The possibility of survival was intimately intertwined with that Kafkaesque obstacle that only very few were able to decipher. The story of Transit begins with a briefcase containing the essential documents for obtaining a transit visa. The protagonist, a German who has fled from a labor camp, happens to come into possession of this suitcase and travels to Marseille, a port where it is impossible to stay and from which it is impossible to leave without the proper papers. A sign of an indolent Europe, incapable of overcoming its decline, the narrator is carried along by the inertia of the search, although his indolent spirit does not really desire anything. By assuming the identity of the suitcase's owner, he finds himself in a position to apply for a visa at the Mexican consulate and to live a love story, impossible because it is not his fault, with Marie, the wife of the real owner of the documents. Marseille becomes the stage where the wounded spirit of Europe parades, channeled into diverse characters who, in a slow wandering through sordid cafes and increasingly scarce food rations, gradually lose that ephemeral right to existence that transit documents grant.