After his father lost his job six years later, the Schreibers left Berlin, moving to Antwerp, where they lived in abject poverty.
In 1937, he began to write a diary and tried to establish contact with various writers (Romain Rolland, Georges Duhamel, Francis Carco)).
He also kept abreast of the literary world and thus discovered the works of other Jewish immigrant writers from the East, in particular those of Irène Némirovsky and Jean Malaquais.
At this time, Boris Schreiber visited Gide in Cabris, where he also met Roger Martin du Gard, Henri Thomas and Jean Schlumberger.
Although he was registered with the Vichy administration as a stateless Russian, he escaped persecution under anti-Jewish laws because his religion was specified as "orthodox".
After the death of his mother (1985), he began to write autobiographical works and was awarded the Prix Renaudot for Un silence d'environ une demi-heure in 1996.
These two poles flowed into one another; life and fiction fed into each other through this matrix, deep and unvoiced, that he chose to use, drawing on his diary (not published) and processing his memories about the wartime events and his feelings as a Jewish youth, which he had not been able to put to paper during the war.
Schreiber lived for writing; he constantly battled with his father, who disapproved of his vocation, and with publishers, whose rejections he found humiliating.
It was written after a period of silence of approximately five years, a time during which he had been forced to stay silent as a Jewish and stateless youth under German occupation.