It is said that everyone dies twice.

The first time is when the heart stops beating and the soul leaves your body, and the second time is when no one alive remembers that you ever lived. In the early years of the World War II,

Europe was in turmoil.

People were trying to escape German forces and regularly disappeared at the hands of the Gestapo. Many hoped for a way out of  Europe, and for safety on other and more distant continents. Lisbon was the harbour from where ships would leave for the US, far away from the dangers of the ever-increasing threat from the rapidly expanding Third Reich. 

One night in Lisbon, a man is walking along the port, desperately hoping to find a way onboard one of the ships so that he and his wife can find a way to safety on the other side of the Atlantic.

Suddenly, he is approached by a stranger, who offers him two tickets with a ship leaving already the next day. The only condition is that they spend the night together, so that the stranger can tell him his story.

Reluctantly, thinking it is some sort of trap, the man agrees, and so begins the story of a young married couple from Osnabrück. The husband was politically active and critical of the Nazi regime.

Betrayed by his brother-in-law, he is taken to a camp but escapes, after which he spends the next five years in hiding outside of Germany, until he finally one day returns to his wife.

Together, they flee from Germany, and the novel follows the two on their dangerous journey through a Europe on the brink of war.

The couple is deeply in love, but the love story is set against an intensely dark political climate, where everything has been turned upside down and nothing is as it once was.

In this way, the novel is both about relationships and about a distressing chapter in the story of humanity.

Erich Maria Remarque is mostly famous for his anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front, (turned into film and awarded Best Movie of the Year in 1930), but he has written many other novels, elegant, sombre and thought-provoking, often on the themes of love and loss, with the World War II as ominous backdrop. 

The reader never learns the name of stranger that tells his story.

His passport was a gift from another man on the run, and so he goes by Schwarz (which was the name in the passport). At the end of the story, the passport once again trades hands, and the man listening is given the passport and thus also a new name.

The play with names and identities mirrors the theme of the novel; of how names, the very symbol of a person, in time will be forgotten.

When this happens, also the memory of the person behind the name disappears.

This is why stories need to be told – the stranger with the tickets to America wants himself and his wife to be remembered, he wants someone to know that they once existed.