Fate Hanged On A Hairbreadth Poem by Paul Hartal

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.