The truck is empty and waiting near the little city of Kecskemét, Hungary, in a parking lot that is quiet and dark because the waxing moon already has set and the sun won’t rise for hours. It is a Volvo, with a white cab, six wheels, and a rectangular cargo box on the back that is big enough to haul freight but small enough not to draw attention on the road to Austria.
On the front of the cargo box, mounted above the cab, is a refrigeration unit, which looks like a large air conditioner: The truck used to haul chicken processed by a Slovak company called Hyza. The name is still on the side in brown, the Y replaced by a silhouette of a hen, even though Hyza had sold the truck a year before, in 2014. The new owner, a Hungarian company that exists only on paper and doesn’t pay its taxes, was supposed to remove the logo, as well as the slogan on the rear doors: “I taste so good because they feed me so well.”
People are waiting to get into the empty truck. They have traveled for weeks from Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria, either directly or from a swollen, festering camp in Turkey, part of the largest human migration since World War II. Most of them have come very recently across the border with Serbia, where the Hungarian government is building a fence of barbed wire and chain link. A few of them had made it as far as Budapest, but they’d been stranded in a railway station with thousands of other refugees, so they’ve backtracked to Kecskemét to get in the truck that will get them to Austria and maybe beyond.
Fifty-nine of those waiting are men. Eight are women and four are children, one just a toddler. Each of those 71 people has paid hundreds of euros for a ride, but none of them are eager to get into the chicken truck. The size of the cargo box—eight feet wide and less than 20 feet long—and the number of bodies both are obvious, even in the dark, and the former is not reasonably large enough to accommodate the latter. There might be enough room for everyone to stand, but not to move.
They’ve been swindled. They paid smugglers thousands of dollars to get them from where they began to where they want to go, mostly Germany. They hoped for taxis or Sprinter vans or plain sedans. Or they’ve come segment by miserable segment: huddled in an overloaded dinghy from Turkey to Greece, a long walk across Serbia, a longer wait in a detention camp in one country or another. They slept on cement at Budapest’s Keleti train station until a young man in sunglasses and slicked hair sold them a ride to Vienna. Maybe they’ve been told their ride would be in the back of the truck. Surely none of them were told they’d be pushed in with 70 others, because none of them would have agreed.
But what is their other option, right now, in the morning in a parking lot in a little city in a strange country? Get out and walk away? Wait for the police to grab them?
They are 200 miles from Vienna. The M5 to the M0 bypass around Budapest to the M1. Three hours and one minute if there’s no traffic, and there won’t be at this hour. Three hours and one minute until a new life.
They get in the truck.
August had been unusually warm in Hungary, but the heat finally broke ten days ago. In the early morning of August 26, the air outside is in the mid-60s. But inside the truck, in an insulated box when the doors are closed and all their bodies press together, the temperature immediately begins to rise.
The refrigeration unit is broken, and it wouldn’t matter if it worked, anyway. The box is airtight.
The truck turns onto the highway as the first glow of dawn blushes the eastern sky. Already it is hard to breathe.
There is no pleasant way, generally speaking, to migrate from a bad place to someplace you hope will be better. For one, it almost always is illegal: A perverse oddity of the modern world is that fleeing a war zone—Syria, Afghanistan, ISIS-occupied Iraq, for example—beyond a refugee camp involves breaking one or many sovereign laws. An Afghan shopkeeper cannot simply move to Copenhagen even if he has the financial means, just as a Syrian dentist cannot easily relocate her practice to Colorado. There are exceptions, a stingy few visas for the exceptionally skilled and lucky, scattered resettlement programs, asylum if one can get to a country that will grant it. But try to escape a kleptocratic authoritarian so you can feed your family and there’s not even the option of a camp. There’s nothing but roadblocks.
Because such journeys are illegal, they also require an unreasonable outlay of cash and an enormous assumption of risk—both of which tend to rise with how far you’re going, how awful a place you left, and how treacherous the obstacles in between. A Syrian refugee escaping a civil war that’s destroyed her country has to first get into and then across Turkey to the western coast. Then the Aegean Sea gets in the way. A safe and seaworthy ferry to Greece, as Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch has repeatedly pointed out, costs an EU citizen 20 euros, but the Syrian refugees last fall paid 1,400 U.S. dollars—about 66 times as much—to make the same crossing in an overloaded and flimsy dinghy, dozens of which putter away from the Turkish coast every day. Those boats, such as they are, also tend to capsize or sink: In the first ten months of 2015, more than 3,000 refugees drowned before they reached a Greek island.
The risk can be mitigated with even more money, of course. A refugee trying to take the most direct route out of Afghanistan, for instance, can buy a counterfeit passport respectable enough to get through most European airports for $25,000. A visa into Turkey—rarely a final destination, but one avoids going overland through Iran—can be bought for $5,000. An Afghan in Budapest named Ali told me his uncle, who lived in a province currently being overrun by the Taliban, paid $60,000 to get himself, his wife, and his three children to Europe. Ali told him it was too much and too dangerous. “At least I will be living,” his uncle said. He signed away all his land, 15 fertile acres, to cover part of the cost. “The person who is middle-class,” Ali told me, “who isn’t armed, who doesn’t want to kill people, he has only one choice. Leave.”
Smugglers are almost always involved, either arranging the entire itinerary, like black-market travel agents, or freelancing individual segments. They are parasites, preying on human desperation, but they are also businessmen, professional in their own way. Their job is to move people from one point to another, and if they don’t do that effectively—if they steal their clients’ money or abandon them in a forest or suffocate them in the back of a truck—they will eventually lose their customer base. True, the people being smuggled have no legal recourse, but it’s a referral-based industry. Word gets around.
In ordinary times, anyway. But more than a million people migrated into Europe last year, mostly refugees from the Middle East and Afghanistan and almost all of them funneling up through Greece, Macedonia, or Bulgaria, and then Serbia, paths that converged on the Hungarian frontier. By late summer, most of them didn’t need to be herded over the border by smugglers, as their enormous numbers—8,000 a day, give or take—made being surreptitious rather pointless. They could simply walk. For a while, many of them registered with the authorities and were detained in camps before being allowed to continue farther into Europe. But then the registration system was overwhelmed and the camps collapsed into overcrowded squalor, and Hungary tightened its border with Serbia before closing it completely. Yet still people kept coming. So many were trying to move all at once that the established smugglers couldn’t keep pace.
Supply quickly rose to meet demand. Taxi drivers staged themselves at a gas station just north of the Serbian border, charging €200 a head for a ride to Budapest, €300 all the way to Vienna if someone negotiated hard enough. Every palooka who’d ever hauled bootleg vodka—Bulgarians, Romanians, Romas who usually worked the northern routes—started stuffing vans and trucks with people. None of them could be vetted through the migrant networks. None of them had reputations. They had vehicles. They had a secondhand chicken truck.
“The person who doesn’t have a lot of money or who doesn’t want to pay, he doesn’t have a choice,” said Attila Fekete, a Hungarian journalist who’s covered the underworld for decades. “And if you don’t want to pay for the brand name, you take your chances.”
How hard could it be, anyway? Smuggling is smuggling, the thinking seemed to be. Drugs, guns, booze. “The item being transported,” he said, “is just a question of packaging.”
Except drugs and guns don’t need air.
The truck with the chicken logo on the side is passing Hegyeshalom, the last village before the border, at ten o’clock in the morning. It follows the M1 into Austria, where the highway becomes the A4. It rumbles and sputters a few miles farther, then pulls to the shoulder not far from a town called Parndorf.
The truck has been giving the drivers trouble all morning. At least they’ve made it to Austria. Most of the way. Far enough.
The drivers get out of the cab, wait for the lead car that was running ahead to watch for police and border checks to pick them up.
One of them goes to the back of the truck. The doors are locked, and have been since it left Kecskemét. There are no sounds coming from the cargo box, no muffled voices, no dull, thudding bangs on the walls. He opens the truck. He slams the door shut again, makes sure it is locked before he hops into the lead car. They drive away in a panic.
The truck sits in the sun on the pavement all day and all night and half of the next day, too.
A maintenance worker is mowing grass by the side of the road. It is about noon when he notices a damp spot on the cement beneath the rear of the truck. A fluid is dripping out. There is a stench.
The grass mower calls the highway patrol. An officer arrives after midday, pulls behind the chicken truck. He opens the door to the cargo box, then twists away and vomits.
More police are summoned, then technicians in white jumpsuits, hoods pulled over their heads and masks stretched across their faces. They study the truck on the side of the road. It’s hot, the temperature climbing to the mid-80s outside, and at least 15 degrees hotter in the back of the truck. The smell is horrific, acrid sweet. They guess at least 20 bodies are inside. No, more. They tell reporters that as many as 50 people are dead in the truck.
A wrecker arrives, winches up the truck, the bodies still inside. It goes east on the A4, back toward Hungary, to a cool and cavernous building in Nickelsdorf. Forensic examiners start to gently untangle the bodies that had begun to decompose in the heat. They will all be autopsied, but already it is assumed that they suffocated and that they did so somewhere in Hungary.
Counting the bodies is a tedious procedure, carefully lifting away one to find others beneath. The smallest, the children, one of them a girl not even a year old, are buried in the heap. By nightfall, the local police chief won’t be able to say how many people died in the truck. That will have to wait until morning, when everyone has been removed and cataloged and carefully placed in 71 body bags.
Migrants have come to Hungary for decades, a stutter-step march of people out of the Balkans and Africa and points beyond. Almost none of them have ever wanted to stay. Hungary just happens to be a geographically convenient route into more prosperous Western Europe, the last few hundred kilometers of highway or rail line before Austria and, beyond, Germany or Scandinavia.
Getting from one side of the country to the other was not especially difficult, relatively speaking. Because Hungary is part of the Schengen area, 26 European nations that have eliminated passport controls, anyone who made it into Hungary with enough money for a train ticket or a taxi or a smuggler’s van generally could continue west and north without too much risk. Some of them were stopped, of course, but since they all were trying to leave, they were of no particular concern to the locals. By one estimate, for example, as many as 50,000 people from Kosovo slipped through the country between November 2014 and February 2015, largely unnoticed. “The only thing they were interested in,” says Marta Pardavi, the co-chair of the Helsinki Committee in Budapest, “was how fast they could get to Germany.”
Where people have migrated from has shifted with calamities and economies. Before the Kosovars, there were Turks and Kurds, and before them were Serbians, Moldovans, and Romanians. The Syrians, and the Iraqis and Afghans, too, started coming at the beginning of 2015. They were not unexpected.
The Syrian civil war began in 2011, and within three years, almost 3 million refugees had fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt. Iraqis who years ago, during the last war, had fled to Syria were displaced again. Parts of Iraq were overrun by ISIS. Afghanistan disintegrated again as well. By 2014, having already spilled into Bulgaria and Italy, refugees from the region began trickling into, and mostly through, Hungary.
In the first seven months of 2014, the authorities identified 3,025 Syrians, 4,068 Afghans, and 127 Iraqis illegally entering the country. Those were modest numbers, but they touched off what András Kováts, the director of Menedék (it means “refuge”), the Hungarian Association for Migrants, calls chain migration: As more people make it to Western Europe—by train, by foot, by smuggler’s truck—the easier it is for others to follow, both because they have better information on how to get there and because family and friends are waiting to help them get settled. So that trickle began to grow exponentially, into a stream in the spring of 2015, a river by midsummer, a deluge in the August heat. That month, 52,750 people, mostly Syrians and Afghans, illegally crossed the border from Serbia. Africans, from Eritrea and other countries, slipped in, too, taking advantage of the numbers and the lack of security in Libya.
It was apparent for years, in other words, that hundreds of thousands of displaced people eventually would begin moving toward Europe, that a mass migration would need to be managed and a humanitarian crisis mitigated, that great numbers of people would come whether they technically were allowed to or not, and that they would need food and shelter and proper vetting. None of this was a surprise. It was entirely predictable—in fact, was predicted—that an enormous wave of human desperation and misery was rolling toward Europe, that it would wash ashore in Greece and then continue northward. There was ample time to prepare, either to ameliorate or to exploit.
The politicians currently governing Hungary chose the latter. For them, refugees were a political opportunity. They prepared by laying coils of razor wire at the base of a chain-link fence.
People do not stuff themselves into the back of an airless truck unless it is the least worst of many bad options. If it is imperative, for whatever reason, to get from one place to another, and if a person can’t do so safely and legally, then he will take risks that otherwise would be unthinkable.
And if a country enacts new laws and enforces old ones more vigorously and erects more imposing obstacles—even when it knows it cannot possibly prevent anyone trying to migrate—the journey will only be made less safe and the risks more extreme. But that’s precisely what Hungary did.
In October 2014, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party tanked after it proposed taxing Internet usage; the party lost a million supporters, almost half of those who’d voted for Fidesz six months earlier. It needed an issue to reclaim its base, which, given Hungary’s conservative politics—Fidesz’s only credible competition is from the ultra-nationalist Jobbik party—would have to be a right-wing cause. Conveniently, there happened to be at the time a spike in the number of Kosovars and ethnic Albanians migrating into Europe. On February 2, 2015, after thousands of Kosovars in the previous months had passed through without concern, police boarded a train to Munich in the western Hungarian town of Tatabánya and removed 50 migrants. At the next stop, in Gyó´r, they pulled 250 more from the train.
“That was the first time,” says András Pulai, the director of the polling firm Publicus, “that anyone knew it was an issue.”
It was also the foundation of a new narrative that cast Hungary—or, rather, Fidesz—as protecting its people from a phantom menace of swarming migrants. In May, when the number of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan had ticked up, the government mailed a “national consultation” on immigration to every household, a dozen questions that were the written equivalent of a push poll.
“In Paris the lives of innocent people were extinguished, in cold blood and with terrifying brutality,” Orbán wrote in the introduction, referencing the Charlie Hebdo attack. (The more deadly Paris attacks were still six months in the future.) “This incomprehensible act of horror also demonstrated that Brussels and the European Union are unable to adequately deal with the issue of immigration.”
The questions were equally subtle:
“There are some who think that mismanagement of the immigration question by Brussels may have something to do with increased terrorism. Do you agree with this view?”
“We hear different views on the issue of immigration. There are some who think that economic migrants jeopardize the jobs and livelihoods of Hungarians. Do you agree?”
“Would you support the Hungarian government in the introduction of more stringent immigration regulations, in contrast to Brussels’ lenient policy?”
A month later, in June, the government announced it would build the fence along the border with Serbia. The government also spent a quarter-million dollars erecting billboards with messages such as IF YOU COME TO HUNGARY, DON’T TAKE THE JOBS OF HUNGARIANS! AND IF YOU COME TO HUNGARY, YOU MUST FOLLOW OUR LAWS! If those weren’t clear enough, there was one with a smiling young blonde in a low-cut tank top: WE DO NOT WANT ILLEGAL MIGRANTS!
All of those signs were in Hungarian, a linguistic orphan unrelated to any other common language and indecipherable to anyone—like, say, almost every migrant—who doesn’t speak it.
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“This was just a political play for their own voters,” Pulai says.
The stagecraft seemed to intensify with the crisis. By the end of summer, for instance, about 1,500 migrants a day had been moving through the Keleti train station in Budapest, a grand nineteenth-century building with 13 tracks, the city’s main international train terminal. People might have stayed for a night, maybe two, but soon enough they were able to buy tickets and board passenger cars and roll out of Hungary.
But in late August, delays at the station started growing. Ticket lines for migrants were interminably long. People paid for seats on trains they then weren’t allowed to board. Fifteen hundred migrants was now a problematic volume. And then, on September 1, the government closed the station, the effect of which was to corral thousands of people into a big, visible building.
Officially, the government was merely fulfilling its obligation to the European continent. “The Hungarian police,” Prime Minister Orbán’s office announced, “are maintaining order within clearly defined statutory boundaries in relation to the thousands of migrants who have entered the EU illegally.…” The statement did not explain why maintaining such order hadn’t been necessary all summer as migrants had moved through Keleti. But Orbán, in a radio interview on September 4, gave a hint. “We may one morning wake up,” he said, “and realize that we are in the minority on our own continent.”
That is a fine and scary sound bite, but it is also not remotely plausible. There are more than a half-billion people in Europe. The continent can easily absorb a million newcomers and, considering its aging population and declining workforce, probably should. Hungary, meanwhile, isn’t absorbing anyone. It’s fiercely homogeneous, officially hostile to outsiders, and, by European standards, poor; even manual labor pays three times as much in Austria, one country to the west. Immigration, illegal and otherwise, simply has never been a concern.
But such xenophobic cant has to be understood in the context of domestic politics, not international policy. For the cynical, great masses of traveling foreigners make excellent political props, especially if they come from lands of suicide bombers and medieval barbarians and lunatic theocrats. That those props are real people, and that they are escaping those places, is irrelevant. Not coincidentally, penning thousands of people in a train station in the heart of Budapest presented an exquisite visual for anyone claiming to be standing firm against Muslim hordes invading, as Orbán put it, “Christian Europe.” So, too, did a small riot along the Serbian border fence that was either quelled—the official Hungarian version—or provoked.
“This was all meant for the public,” says András Kováts at Menedék. “ ‘See how strong we are, protecting Europe. We are the defenders of the prosperous West. This is our sacrifice, and this is our greatness.’ ”
The chicken truck has a temporary Hungarian license tag, which can be traced to the man who registered it, who almost certainly is no one of any authority or particular consequence, just a guy who pocketed a few euros for the favor of picking up a plate. But it is easy to track, and thus it is easy to locate at least one person involved with a truck that smothered 71 people.
Hungarian police raid 20 homes in the late hours of August 27 and the early ones of the next day. They soon arrest five men, four Bulgarians and an Afghan, all of whom are suspected of being involved in the deaths of 71 migrants packed into the chicken truck. How exactly each might be involved—whether one drove the truck or loaded the truck or procured the temporary license plate for the truck—is not explained. (A sixth man is arrested in Bulgaria and later released.)
A month later, none have been charged with a crime. Gábor Schmidt, a prosecutor in Kecskemét, the Hungarian city where the chicken truck was registered, explains that they are being held in pre-trial detention while being investigated for qualified human smuggling, “qualified” being the Hungarian equivalent of the American “aggravated.” (One of the qualifiers is that people are dead, and another is that they suffered terribly while being smothered dead. The third is that the smuggling was done by an OCG, an organized criminal group, albeit a sloppy and reckless one.)
Schmidt tells me their ages—the Afghan is 28, and the Bulgarians are 50, 37, 29, and 24—but he will not tell me their names. He will not tell me how they were identified or if they have criminal records. He will not tell me if the truck had been used to smuggle other people before August 26, and he will not tell me innocuous details, such as the dimensions of the cargo container.
Mostly, Schmidt has statistics about illegal border crossings and human-smuggling cases, both of which have increased dramatically in 2015. It is too soon to tell if the fence will have any effect. “But in recent times, there have been far more human-smuggling cases, transporting far more people under bad circumstances,” he says. “Someone who gets his fortune, who makes his profit, from the abuse of migrants who flee terrible circumstances is a danger to society. As you can see, putting 71 people in such a lorry…”
He tells me about another case, 40 migrants in the back of a truck that rolled over on the M5 near Kecskemét at two o’clock in the morning on August 28—the day after the chicken truck was found. They all survived, but seven ended up in the hospital. The driver, a Romanian man, 30 years old, was paid a €50 deposit and would have collected €150 more if he’d gotten where he was going. He was arrested, charged, tried, and convicted in 28 days, sentenced on September 25 to 18 months in prison and three years’ banishment from Hungary.
So the cases can be tried quickly. But Schmidt says he does not know when the five men who allegedly killed 71 migrants in the chicken truck will even be formally charged, only that they can be held for up to three years regardless. He will not tell me why the investigation is taking so long. He is very gracious about not telling me much of anything, really. Privacy laws and such.
One Saturday afternoon in early October, no different from the Friday before or the Sunday after, a long, thick line of refugees trudged along a wide path worn into a green Croatian field. The path ended at a low embankment at the edge of an old Hungarian man’s tree farm in the tiny village of Zákány.
The berm marked the border between the two countries. Silver-white beams poked up from the dirt, the posts of another fence Hungary was building. Razor wire tumbled in a double row on the ground, except for a gap about 12 feet wide where eight Hungarian policemen in red berets were posted. More were spread in a loose corridor through the trampled parts of the tree farm, on the other side of which was a rundown train station and, on the tracks, a rundown train.
The police stopped each group while an interpreter shouted out the rules. Walk, or you can’t come in. Form two lines, side by side, or you can’t come in. Go directly to the train. Do not get off the train.
I watched as they were allowed over the embankment roughly a hundred at a time. The first groups were composed mostly of young men, as are about two-thirds of all the migrants traveling into Europe, young men typically being stronger and healthier and better able to make the pioneering trip. Families—little kids, old women, fathers and mothers—came through in the later groups. On the far side of the tree farm, they turned parallel to the tracks. Soldiers with automatic weapons slung across their backs lined the edge of the field to keep anyone from darting into the saplings, though no one showed the least inclination to do so. Police officers in blue uniforms, some with surgical masks, guided the migrants toward the train cars on the track, moving a wooden pallet from car to car as a makeshift boarding platform.
Twelve hundred people boarded that one train. Roughly as many boarded one earlier and another later, and the trains kept coming. Publicly, and with great bombast, Hungary had built a mighty fence to hold back the Muslim hordes. But all the fence had done was divert refugees into Croatia, which then delivered them to a lonely border town. Quietly, then, Hungary was shepherding thousands upon thousands of people into Europe every day, without so much as asking their names. It was unclear how that contributed to European security.
On the other hand, it was a more humane policy, though only marginally. There was no food. There were toilets, but they emptied directly onto the tracks, and no one was allowed to use them until the train started moving. No one was allowed to pee outside the train, either, and there was nowhere to do so, anyway.
The train was provided by the Hungarian government, and when it was fully loaded, it backed up into a switchyard, where nine civilians were waiting with water and food. They worked around the clock in volunteer shifts, because the migrants and refugees came at all hours. Under temporary canopies, they filled bags with three pieces of bread, two pieces of cheese, one banana, and a candy bar or a cookie. They had 20 minutes to distribute everything, passing bottles and bags through the windows of the train cars, which they managed with practiced efficiency.
Hegyeshalom, the Hungarian village the refugees were going to on the Austrian border, was four hours away. (The train is very slow.) Other civilians usually were waiting there, including, often, Márton Bisztrai, who organized one of the volunteer groups. Bisztrai and his colleagues also had food and water and blankets, and they directed people from the train depot to the Austrian border two kilometers on. Usually, Bisztrai drove a van from the border to the back of the procession to pick up the stragglers, old women and people in wheelchairs and families with small children. They didn’t always want to get in. They’d heard about the chicken truck. Word gets around.
He did his best to soothe them, explained that the van had room and air and that the border was only five minutes away. But he understood. “I really believe,” he told me in early October, “that those 71 people were forced into that truck by the laws Hungary has put in place.”
But it no longer was only Hungary impeding the migration. A week later, Hungary finished the fence along the Croatian border, all 216 miles, and closed the gap at Zákány. People were shunted across the length of Croatia and through tiny Slovenia into Austria. But there were so many of them that Croatia threatened to close its borders, and Slovenia protested that it was overwhelmed, and in late October, Austria announced that it was tightening its border controls, too. And that was before the Paris attacks in November, which provoked a Europe-wide backlash, the greatest threat yet to the refugees.
EU ministers met to come up with a plan, and they failed, and people still came. It was akin to stacking rocks to hold back a river: The stream will not stop but rather finds gaps and cracks, splashing through more chaotically and unpredictably.
There was yet another truck abandoned on the highway just over the border in Austria the same day the chicken truck was found. It was near Parndorf, and there were 81 people inside—alive, but only because they’d pried open the door of their semi-trailer with a crowbar. In the big trucks, even the ones that don’t have airtight broken-down refrigerated units, it’s hard to breathe when people are packed in too tightly.
Roland Koch, a prosecutor in Eisenstadt, Austria, had seen people in worse shape, 20 people, sometimes 50, stuffed into a truck and half-suffocated by the time the police got to them. “Very bad shape,” he told me in early October. “Very bad.”
During the fall, people were still being smuggled into Austria more often in vans, at least the ones the police and prosecutors found. But larger trucks were becoming more common, and that was just a matter of basic economics.
“There are more and more people who want to be smuggled,” Koch said. “And the smugglers get more and more greedy, and they take more and more risks.”
The men who drove the chicken truck were greedy, but it is unclear if they were taking a risk or if they were just stupid, if they didn’t know a refrigerated truck was airtight or if they thought it wouldn’t matter. Koch said he did not know, because none of the Austrian investigators had spoken to any of the men in Hungarian custody. Not that it mattered, because Koch wouldn’t tell me, anyway. Koch, like Gábor Schmidt in Hungary, is friendly and gracious in telling me almost nothing about how 71 people ended up dead.
It is impossible to say precisely what happened to the chicken truck on the highway between Kecskemét and Parndorf. The mechanics might be clarified someday, the minor narrative details of who drove and what broke and how much people paid to stand in the back. But there will always be a dreary confusion about it, because everyone who matters can’t explain. They’re all dead.
Their families don’t know. Reporters for The Guardian and The New York Times found some of them, mostly through social-networking sites in Iraq and Turkey—the names of the victims had not been released by late November—but none of the relatives even knew about the truck until after the fact. Most of them insisted their son or brother or cousin would never willingly climb into an airless cargo container. But no one knows that, not unless he’s there, not unless it’s his choice, right then, in the morning dark in a little city in a strange country.
“They would get in anyway,” a man in a café in Budapest tells me. “There is no other option. They just see a truck that someone says will take them.”
The man is not a smuggler, technically, but he works with smugglers and has for years. The organized operations have always been there, running recruiters out of Internet cafés and kebab shops, shuffling vehicles among dummy corporations.
But the enormous influx of migrants whipsawed the economics, the demand driving up fees, drawing a surplus of amateurs into the supply, then crashing the prices. For a brief while, a car ride from the border to Budapest, the man says, could be negotiated down to €70 a head.
Then the borders were fenced off—Serbia on September 15, Croatia a month later. The Paris attacks in November threatened to bring even more border restrictions and closings. But thousands of people were still trying to get to Western Europe. Making it harder only made it more expensive, and making it more expensive makes it more profitable. “You can’t stop it,” the man says. “The government is helping the smugglers with the border controls.”
More people will get into more trucks. He is certain of that. Most of them will get where they’re going. But some of them, a few of them, will die. “Járulèkos vesztesèg,” he says. “A loss, but understandable.”
Sean Flynn is a GQ correspondent.