The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (18 page)

Jews, he wrote
, had to be isolated in ghettos, because the greatest danger of infection came from “lousy and filthy dwellings of typhus-infected Jews in the Polish interior.” Eyer reiterated such sentiments in a journal article published at this time (the journal’s Jewish editor had fled the Nazis). It is “the unclean people” who spread typhus, he wrote—be they Abyssinian shepherds or ghetto Jews. The only way to stop its spread was “the complete and pitiless enclosure of all known or suspected endemic carrier populations; in Poland, for example, the isolation of the Jewish ghettos that is currently underway.”

In Polish cities
, tradition called for students to attend church—or temple, if they were Jews—on the first day of school. On September 1, 1939, Luisa Hornstein was 13 years old and all dressed for synagogue when she heard the sound of airplanes. When the bombing started, she and her family went into the basement, going upstairs only to fetch food and fill pots and tubs with water. They stayed there three weeks.

Hornstein was the youngest of three children in the family of a well-to-do timber merchant in prewar Lwów. The family lived on Bernstein, a leafy street in the Jewish quarter northeast of the Opera House. “I remember hearing Hitler on the radio,” she recalled six decades later in Cincinnati, where she was a pediatrician and her son, Frank, was my elementary school chum. “He was so violent, it was such an awful speech, his voice, and you could hear the masses cheering. My mother was very afraid. ‘This is not going to be a good place to live,’ she said. ‘There is going to be a war.’ My father said it would take him five years to liquidate his business. ‘Then start now!’ my mother said.” But now was too late.

The Nazi bombardment
destroyed gas, water, and power lines in many parts of town, and this led to hoarding.
The Eastern Trade Fair
opened on time, but petered out after a week. On September 2, the first refugees streamed in from western Poland, and soon the stream turned into a river—of cars, carts, and wheelbarrows, anything that went on wheels. Thousands of Lwów inhabitants sought safety with friends and relatives in the country. Thousands fled into Hungary and Romania. By the third day of the bombardment, most shops were closed; by the fourth, there was nothing to buy. Trainloads of wounded Polish soldiers started arriving. And in the third week, the German army took up positions on the outskirts of the city and began shelling. Many of the city’s defenders were Jews—the Bund enlisted 100 men to build trenches.
Three weeks of bombing
and shelling killed at least 800 people in Lwów.

And then suddenly, on September 20, the fighting stopped. At first, the Poles thought they had driven the Germans off. Then the Russians arrived. Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, Hitler and Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with a secret protocol that carved up Poland between them. It called for the invading German forces to withdraw to Przemy
l, 60 miles west of Lwów.

The first days of the Soviet invasion were relatively peaceful. Polish soldiers threw down their arms, took off their uniforms, and walked away, unmolested by the arriving Red Army. Stalin’s portrait went up all around town, and Soviet commissars began converting Lwów and the surrounding area into an enclave of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

For many sophisticated
Lwowites, the iconic image of the Soviet invasion was the Russian ladies whom they encountered at swimming pools in underwear, or at the theater clad in nightgowns they had purchased from clever shopkeepers who claimed they represented the finest in evening wear. Or perhaps it was the Red Army soldiers with their wrist watches. They bought several at a time, with expressions of joy, and wore all of them at once, whether or not they worked. The Russians were astounded by the abundance of goods in Lwów. A soldier would enter a store to buy a chocolate bar. When he got it, he’d ask if he could buy another. He’d look around to see whether other soldiers were nearby, then in a low voice ask for the whole box. The Russians boasted about how good things were back home. No one believed them. These barbarians blew their noses without handkerchiefs and didn’t give their seats on the trolley to women or old people. The humor of the occupation faded when the secret police, the NKVD, began conducting nighttime raids, packing people into railroad cars bound for Siberia, with no explanation. The first to go were the Red Army’s political enemies, then the rich, then Jewish refugees from the West. Lwów time was set two hours earlier to Moscow time, which meant you went to work while it was still dark. The occupation confirmed what middle-class Poles had always thought of the Russians. Czarist or Communist, they were ignorant and brutal rubes.

Although the invasion was tragic
for everyone, at first it seemed bad for Jews only if they were rich. Businesses were nationalized and thousands of well-to-do Jews were deported. For others, there was a nervous waiting game, making do in a new economy. School resumed eventually, but it was completely different. The Soviets decided that at Jewish schools the language would be Yiddish, though most children in the middle-class parts of town, coming from more or less assimilated families, spoke only Polish or German and perhaps a bit of Hebrew. In the Polish schools, the language was now Ukrainian—the “western Ukraine,” the area that Austrians and Poles had called Galicia, had been “returned to the motherland.”
In a kindergarten
, the teacher asked the children, “Which of you believes in God, and which in Stalin?” The ones who said Stalin got caramels.

The Red Army enters Lwów, September 1939. (Bridgeman Art Library.)

Later, many Poles and Ukrainians would recall that the Jews had done well during the Soviet period, but this was not true, though Jews did become more visible.
The majority of the 22,000
Lwów residents sent to the Soviet interior were Jews, often packed 150 at a time into freezing railcars that spent weeks inching to Kazakhstan. Nor were Jews favored in the new government. Of the 1,495 delegates chosen to the Ukrainian national assembly in 1940, for example, only 20 were Jews. But the Russians ended official discrimination and dispatched high-profile Jewish Communists, commissars, and cultural figures to Lwów.
They lifted bans or limits
on Jewish admissions to the universities, the militia, and the police. Jews were still a tiny minority in these armed units, but “the presence of any Jewish cops might have seemed outrageous to Ukrainians and Poles precisely because it was unprecedented,” as one observer has written.

More than 50,000
Jews were estimated to have fled to Lwów from German-occupied Poland, and close to half a million people now jammed the sidewalks and apartments of the city, hustling to feed themselves. The Soviets nationalized industry, but often allowed former bosses to remain as supervisors. The minimum wage was increased; living standards seesawed between abundance and deprivation. Goods would be put on display to lure peasants into town to sell their crops. A month later the shelves were empty. Lwowites experienced the history of the Soviet economy on fast-forward.

In November, there was a plebiscite
for the “western Ukraine” to decide whether to join the Soviet Union. Prior to the vote, lavish amounts of food—caviar, sugar, butter—arrived in town. The result, purchased and rigged, was 97 percent in favor. After the plebiscite, a crackdown on the wealthy, professionals, Polish army officers, and other “enemies” began. An exchange with the Nazis allowed people to choose which tyrant’s occupation they preferred. Many Poles and Ukrainians decided to live in Germany. So did a few thousand naïve Jews. The Germans refused to accept the Jews, who were then arrested by Russians as unreliable elements and sent to Siberia or Kazakhstan.
Many died there
of hardships, but most survived, and on balance the deportations saved Jewish lives, because the deportees were gone when the Nazis arrived in Lwów two years later.

Many young Jews
viewed the Soviet occupation as relatively benign—unless their families were marked for deportation. In the schools, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians studied together in an idealistic atmosphere. Frank Stiffel, a Jewish medical student, became editor of a literary magazine at the university. He recalled enjoyable bull sessions with his multinational friends, and picnics at which black bread sandwiches and hardboiled eggs were washed down with soft Crimean wine. At home, he argued with his father, a World War I veteran of the kaiser’s army, who said he’d gladly exchange the Russians for Germans.
Lwów’s mathematicians
continued their café life, though with less élan and fewer cakes. Banach was much beloved by the Soviet mathematicians, who left a few equations in the Scottish Book—the collection of brain-teasing mathematical problems collected at the Scottish Café—and made him a corresponding member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.

To enter town, the Russian tanks had rumbled down Lyczakowska Street, where Fleck and his family lived at no. 34. There is no record of how he felt upon seeing the Red Army, but one can safely assume there was a measure of relief, and his experience under the Soviets was relatively positive.
The Soviets must have considered
Fleck a trustworthy scientist; he and his son had participated in anti-Nazi citizens’ groups, and his friendship with the philosopher Leon Chwistek, whose Soviet sympathies were well-known, may have added to this reputation.
Whatever the case
, though Fleck’s private laboratory was confiscated, the Soviets named him to lead the microbiology department of the new Ukrainian Medical Institute, which was separated from Lwów’s university. He also led the city’s Sanitation and Bacteriological Laboratory, which technically made him Weigl’s superior, since the latter’s laboratory was brought under the aegis of the state. Fleck conducted research as well at the new Mother and Child Hospital, directed by Franciszek Groër.

Fleck’s rise
in status angered some of his Polish colleagues. After watching their relatives’ deportation to Siberia, many Poles felt that to take a job in a Soviet-occupied institution was a form of treason. Some grumbled that Fleck was inappropriately competing with Weigl, his academic mentor.

Weigl, however, held his own within the new order. Just prior to the Nazi invasion, Poland’s national health department had established five institutes to expand production of the vaccine, and there had been talk of removing Weigl from immediate responsibility for its manufacture. Much as the Polish health leaders admired Weigl, at times his scientific purity interfered with their intent to produce greater quantities of vaccine. When war broke out, the government ordered Weigl to retreat to Romania with the Polish army, but he refused, telling his staff and friends that he could not abandon Poland when it needed him. During the winter of 1939, the Soviet authorities in Lwów provided 5,000 doses of the Weigl vaccine to the Nazi
Generalgouvernement
in exchange for five German microscopes.
Intriguingly, this deal
may have been approved by Fleck.

Weigl’s colleagues abroad were at least dimly aware of his plight and sought to help. At a November 17, 1939, meeting of the League of Nations Health Committee, Professor Edmond Sergent, director of the Pasteur Institute in Algiers, offered to give Weigl space in one of his laboratories to continue making the antityphus vaccine.
It is not clear whether Weigl
ever received this offer, but the answer would no doubt have been negative. Weigl would not have wanted to leave, and the Soviets would not have let him go. Like the Germans, they faced an open-ended typhus threat and were eager to vaccinate their troops in preparation for the war against Hitler that they knew would eventually come.
In February 1940
, no less a figure than Nikita Khrushchev, secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, visited Weigl at his laboratory and offered to make him a senior professor at the Soviet Academy of Medicine in Moscow. Weigl declined. As various authorities learned over the years, it was not easy to force Weigl to abandon Lwów.

That said, he was readily tempted by the prospect of meeting other scientists and sharing knowledge.
During the 22 months
of the Soviet occupation of Lwów, Weigl expanded production of the vaccine and visited Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, and Kiev, where he gave lectures and demonstrations on his methods for fighting typhus. Russian professors visited Weigl, too. Lwów was like Vienna to them—a Western paradise. After a few glasses of vodka, the Russian visitors couldn’t resist the temptation to share tales of Stalinist horror. One of them gave Weigl the following advice: “
Never join the party
and do not steal excessively. If you are not a party member, they will court you to join, but once you join and are kicked out, it’s curtains. If you steal too much, it will lead to your demise. If you do not steal at all, you will starve. So remember, steal only in moderation, just enough to survive.”