The Precipice Option

It is 1944 during the last fifteen months of WWll. Twelve thousand Jews, men, women, children were being herded daily onto the Budapest train platform for transport to Auschwitz. Yet on an adjacent platform another train was poised to transport one thousand six hundred eighty-four Jews to Switzerland. What was happening here? Why this odd number of Jews on the other train? What and who is behind this incredible, totally unbelievable situation? Sending a train full of Jews to Switzerland in the middle of the war by the SS was akin to sending it to the moon. Concluding that the order must have come down from the highest echelon of the Nazi hierachy, the author's curiosity got the better of him and he embarked on a five year research quest. As the full picture unfolded, layer by complex layer, his doubt on whether there was still any untold WWll story to be told was soon alleviated. The odd passenger train that drew his attention at first, turned out to just be the tip of an iceberg. The author takes the reader along from one incongruous plot to another, to an array of implausible, incredible and surreal sub-plots. The story gallops across Europe, from war-torn, gritty Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg and Budapest, to the Bergen-Belsen and Mauthausen camps, to neutral, peaceful Stockholm and to elegant St. Gallen and Zurich and on to exotic Istanbul, Aleppo, Jerusalem and Cairo, all in an adventurous and breathless chase aimed at beating the clock and save as many lives as possible before war's end. A colorful cast of characters accompanies the reader, among them world leaders and includling Oskar Schindler and Raul Wallenberg. It is a tale of human-nature in all its vagaries, a 'tour-de-force'of brain vs. brawn that challenges the mind, a precipitous gamble of life and death in a fast, high stakes poker game.