A powerful novel about the German occupation: Transit

At least reading something I'm interested in and care about, Anna Segher's terrific German-language novel about escape from France at the outset of World War II: Transit (1951). I don't know anything about this author, in fact had never heard of her, which, if the novel holds up (I've read about 1/4 of it) makes no sense - and thanks to the great NYRB editions for bringing this work to English-language readers. Seghers's narrator is a young German who had been living in France (I think, the initial actions are not totally clear to me) and held by the Germans and assigned to work duty in one of the shipyards. Along w/ other captive workers he escapes at night and heads for Paris, where he has been befriended before by a French family (the Binnets). He arrives in Paris at about the same time as the German occupying army and of course finds the city in disarray and panic. Eventually, he works his way south to Marseilles, all the while carrying a small suitcase to which he's been entrusted; the suitcase carries an incomplete narrative of a novel by a German author who has committed suicide but left instructions to get the manuscript to his wife, who's in Marseilles and trying for transit to Mexico. Much of action so far, aside from a great story of survival, is about the process of trying to get travel visas and safe passage. The narrator - and thousands of others - finds himself it what today we call a Catch-22, though this novel preceded that war novel by more than a decade: In order to leave Marseilles, you have to show that you have permission to stay (and, it seems, in order to stay you have to show that you have transit to leave). We could also call this system of bureaucratic obstacles "Kafka-esque," which it is - but, unlike Kafka, Seghers is writing historical fiction. The horrors and the tragedies - death, separation, suicide, despair, plus survival - are all the more powerful for being, or at least seeming to be, an accurate account of life in an occupied land. The other work that will come to mind for many readers is the great unfinished novel "Suite Francaise," though that novel focuses on a Jewish family in flight from occupied Paris; the focus here on a young German man is a different perspective on the same picture.