A novel set in specific time of crisis and about the universal human condition

I won't "give away" the ending of Anna Seghers's novel Transit (1951), although it's by no means a novel of suspense, but suffice it to say that this narrative, which is clearly about a particular time and place - France in the early months of the German Occupation, specifically the city of Marseille, where thousands of migrants are seeking transport to America - but it becomes increasingly apparent over the course of the narrative that the specifics of the setting are less significant and the novel is more about man's fate, to crib a phrase from another French writer. The narrator - I don't think we ever learn his name - is one of the few who wants to stay in or near Marseille; he falls in love and gets involved w/ helping a woman, Marie, attain her exit visa and tickets and plans, at least initially, to accompany her in emigration. (There is an extremely complicated plot twist involving the narrator's assumption of her late husband's identity, which I won't explain in any detail.) What's really striking to me are the many absences in this novel, not only regarding the narrator's past (he escaped from a concentration camp in Germany; we don't know why he was imprisoned, nor why he's so sanguine about remaining in France as the Germans expand control) but also the deracination of the historical events: there are virtually no mentions of Jews seeking escape, there are only a few glancing references to the Nazis, to Hitler, to German iconography (Swastikas), there are no references to ongoing public or news events (we don't know precisely what's happening int he war, the extent of the Occupation and Resistance, the negotiations under way among the Germans and other forces in France) - so the experience of the novel is about fear, flight, survival, and the petty forces of resistance, the nightmarish attempt to get all papers in order and all belongings packed and ready for flight, with constant disruptions and disappointments - a novel set in a specific time of crisis but really about the universal human condition.