How did Eliezer's father avoid being selected at Gleiwitz in Wiesel's Night?

Eliezer's father survives selection because of Eliezer. 
Eliezer's father was slated for selection.  Yet, Eliezer is able to inch his way through
the lines and bring him back to the "right" one.  In this, Wiesel shows how much
survival was based so much on the sense of the arbitrary and pure "luck," if one wanted
to call it that:

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I inched my way through the crowd.  Several SS
men rushed to find me, creating such confusion that a number of people were able to
switch over to the right- among them my father and I.  Still, there were gunshots and
some dead.

In this confusion,
Eliezer was able to retrieve his father from the selection of Gleiwitz and forced to
leave the camp on to Buchenwald, where the father will die.  In the end, there was no
overarching or transcendental reason why the father survived selection.  Eliezer's grasp
of the situation as well as the "luck" that other prisoners were switching lines became
the critical reason why the father lived and others did not.