Fate Hanged On A Hairbreadth

It was summer,1944. The train stood at the railway station of Gyŏr, halfway on the road between Budapest and Vienna. In the boxcars there were over 3,000 passengers. The Hungarian gendarmes squeezed the deported men, women and children like sardines into the wagons and the prisoners were crying for help. For the SS-Unterscharführer assigned to the transport it was just another job. The corporal already directed many similar trains to the east. And those trains always went to the east and to the same terminus. However, this transport of deportees was unlike the others. The SS corporal made a fatal mistake but the guards discovered this only at the Slovakian border. The train's number was not on the list of transports destined for Auschwitz. The train stopped at the Slovakian border. Here the guards contacted Colonel Adolf Eichmann by telephone and informed him about the error. Eichmann decided that since the train traveled that far it should continue to Auschwitz. So the SS guards changed the serial number of the train and replaced it with the number of another train departing from Debrecen. Thus, instead of the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Nazi occupied Poland, the train from Debrecen was sent to the distribution camp of Strasshof in Austria. As you see, fate hanged in the war on a hairbreadth. A freak of chance, a random accident, an oversight of procedure, or of a supposed algorithm, could lead to arbitrary decisions regarding the life or death of thousands. Although Strasshof was a brutal slave labor lager, most people there, about 14,000 of the 21,000 deportees, survived the ordeal of the Holocaust.