Science Quote by Klaus Fuchs

Luck is doing enormous moral and political work in Fuchs' recollection, and he knows it. The line reads like a simple travel anecdote, but it’s really an origin story for a life lived under the long shadow of contingency. The Reichstag fire in February 1933 wasn’t just a blaze; it was the accelerant Hitler needed to criminalize dissent, smash civil liberties, and sweep up leftists and organizers. Fuchs, a young German student activist, frames his escape as pure happenstance: he happened to wake early, happened to catch a train, happened not to be home when the state came knocking.

That insistence on randomness is the subtext. It undercuts any heroic self-mythologizing. He doesn’t present himself as cunning or brave; he presents himself as a body narrowly missed by history’s machinery. The effect is chilling, because it implies the inverse: arrest wasn’t reserved for the reckless, it was waiting for the ordinary. Timing, not guilt, determined who vanished.

It also foreshadows the peculiar shape of Fuchs’ later life. A physicist who would become a pivotal atomic spy, he’s often narrated as ideologue or traitor. Here he offers a different self-portrait: someone formed by an early lesson in how quickly a government can turn political identity into a police category. The sentence is almost bureaucratically calm, which is part of its force. The terror sits in the matter-of-factness: the train schedule as a life-saving alibi, the dawn as a thin border between citizen and suspect.