The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (19 page)

Weigl’s disinclination to publish accounts of his work had an unintentionally positive effect during the occupation years. In the absence of a “cookbook” on how to mass-produce the Weigl typhus vaccine, the Soviets and the Nazis alike would depend on Weigl himself to continue its production. Both regimes would no doubt have been happy to replace this obstinately independent scientist. But they were obliged to leave management of vaccine production to Weigl and his staff. A certain amount of Weigl’s time was taken up in intervening on behalf of workers arrested for one reason or another. He was generally successful, with some notable exceptions.
A Ukrainian professor
at the typhus institute, Dr. Zajac, was arrested by the NKVD in January 1941 and beaten to death. But Weigl saved several Poles from deportation, or got them returned from the east. Stefania Skwarczy
ska, a professor of literature who had been deported to Kazakhstan for having a husband in the Polish army, was sent back and became one of Weigl’s louse feeders.

Our most detailed perspective on the Weigl laboratory during the war years comes from Waclaw Szybalski, who has provided his own recollections while gathering those of other witnesses. The Szybalski and Weigl families were close. Szybalski, his brother, and his father worked at the lab during the war and were aware of everything that went on there. Szybalski’s father, Stefan, had been president of a hunting club to which Weigl belonged, and Weigl’s son, Wiktor, was Wacław Szybalski’s best friend. These relationships probably saved their lives.
The Soviet scientist
who was put in charge of the Weigl institute lived in an apartment confiscated from the Szybalskis in the building they continued to inhabit on St. Mark’s Street, across from the Botanical Garden. Stefan Szybalski worked first as a Russian–Polish translator, which enabled him to be present at the meeting with Khrushchev, then as manager of the laboratory’s “car pool,” such as it was. “We got no compensation for any of the apartments, of course,” Szybalski says. “You were glad not to be killed.” On two occasions, Weigl saved the Szybalskis from deportation by insisting that they were crucial to his laboratory operations. Like most of the wealthy people in Lwów, the Szybalskis had been issued Soviet passports appended with the dreaded Paragraph 11, which prohibited the holder from living near borders or in cities and was effectively a ticket to Siberia.
In the first days
of the Soviet invasion, the NKVD had deported about 26,000 Polish reserve officers and murdered them in the Katyn forest and other secret places.

It was certainly a dramatic time to be a young Polish patriot in Lwów. Szybalski, a first-year student of chemistry at the polytechnical, seems to have adjusted easily to the challenges. In the weeks before the Soviet occupation, his chemistry class was 60 percent Polish, 30 percent Jewish, and 10 percent Ukrainian, roughly based on the population breakdown in the city. Under the Russians, the class size was increased from 60 to 120, but 90 percent of the students were Jewish or Ukrainian. The new students included fewer assimilated, well-to-do Jews and more poor Jews from Orthodox families. Szybalski became good friends with some of them and learned a bit of Yiddish. “
They had a good sense
of humor, making fun of the Russians just like us,” he said. “We were all young people. We weren’t prejudiced. The Russians were our common enemy.”

Szybalski’s day during the Soviet occupation typically began with breakfast at eight, followed by a five-minute bike ride to the polytechnical, where he studied part of the time. His major activity at school during this period, however, was the production of TNT for the anti-Soviet resistance. He’d buy the supplies he needed at a hardware store on Akademicka; Professor Edward Sucharda, an organic chemist and rector, instructed Szybalski and three or four other students in the bomb making. The Russians were bringing loads of raw materials and food to Germany, then filling the empty trains with Poles from Lwów and other cities for deportation to Siberia. “Our belief was, ‘The fewer train cars they have, the more the confusion, the fewer of us they can deport,’” Szybalski recalled. “We knew it was all temporary because in three months the Americans would win the war and we’d be free. But in the meantime we had to stop the deportations.” They built and hid the bombs in the basement of the chemistry lab. Szybalski was not part of the demolition squad, but a few times he was invited to watch. “Once they were transporting live chickens to Germany. All of a sudden, a cloud of feathers and the chickens are running around with the heads off. We melted into the forest.”

At the end of June 1940, Stefan Kry
ski, who had come to Lwów to escape Soviet persecution, landed at the Weigl lab. Weigl told him there were three periods in a man’s life. In the first, we think we know everything. In the second, we realize we know nothing. In the third, we start to learn. Unfortunately, most people stay in the first period for so much of their lives that they never manage to generate any new ideas.

He was very sage
, Weigl, except, perhaps, when it came to his personal life. Out of loyalty to his wife, he never considered divorcing her, but their relations cooled, especially after the trip to Ethiopia. Most of his life now was in the lab and spent with Anna Herzig. Early in 1940, Zofia sickened and died of cancer. “After the funeral, my father took me for a long walk. It was the first time I had ever seen him crying,” recalled Wiktor. As they walked, Weigl told his son that he regretted having gone to Ethiopia. “He could not forgive himself for the fact that he’d spent so little time with her, that he had sacrificed the lives of my mother and our family.”

There was little time to grieve, however. With the war and the growth of Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland, Weigl’s vaccine had never been as important. Production increased, but as typhus spread through the ghettos and other areas where poor Poles were on the move, there was never enough of it. Deliberate Nazi policies caused an explosion of typhus among Polish Jews beginning in the winter of 1940.
A November 25, 1939, memorandum
to Himmler from lawyers in the Berlin Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories expresses the Nazi medical perspective toward these events. It stated, “Medical care from our side must be limited to the prevention of the spreading of epidemics to Reich territory. . . . [W]e are indifferent to the hygienic fate of the Jews. . . . [T]he basic principle holds, that their propagation must be curtailed in every possible way.”

German propaganda in Poland: “Jews—Lice—Typhus.” (Bundesarchiv.)

The Nazis’ ultimate plans for the eradication of Jews from Europe had never been a secret. But genocide could not be carried out overnight, and justification was required to inspire thousands of Germans to take the actions that enabled the Holocaust. The unproven
Geomedizin
notion that typhus was a Jewish disease, one that moreover did no real harm to Jews, since they were the racial and geographical carriers of it, offered the typical German public health officer in occupied Poland a psychological out. It seemed to justify a policy of keeping Jews locked behind ghetto walls, where typhus could be confined without threatening the vulnerable Aryan population, especially the German occupants.
As the historian Christopher
Browning writes, “the persistent medieval anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jew as the plague-carrier thus called forth as a modern medical response the revival of a medieval invention—the sealed ghetto.”

The medical establishment of the newly occupied territories was a motley collection of opportunistic hacks, misled patriots, and true believers.
Jost Walbaum, a longtime
Nazi Party member who had befriended
Reichsmarschall
Hermann Göring while treating the latter’s morphine addiction, became director of health in the new
Generalgouvernement
. He was directly involved in building the ghettos, the first of which went up in Warsaw in April 1940. As typhus began to spread later in the year, Walbaum and Hans Frank agreed it was of “greatest importance” that all Jews be brought into ghettos as quickly as possible.

To create the ghettos, the Germans took all the Jews deported from other parts of the country or kicked out of their apartments and crammed them into unheated dwellings with no access to money or food.
By the time the Nazis
sealed the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940, at the start of a terribly cold winter, it contained nearly half a million people—1,100 per hectare, compared with 70 per hectare in the rest of Warsaw.
The German occupation doctors
, who were constantly warning of the dangers of typhus, had done everything they could to encourage its spread. All around the city, hideous posters went up depicting a frightening caricature of a bearded Jew and a louse, with the words “Jews—Lice—Typhus.”
In 1941, the German
propaganda ministry held a competition inviting Polish playwrights to create scripts depicting the threat of Jews and typhus. The winner, a well-known actress and writer named Helena Rapacka, wrote a play entitled
Quarantine
that depicted the Jews as insidious vermin who should never be protected. The play was performed all over the
Generalgouvernement
, before crowds consisting mainly of
Volksdeutsche
, Poles who identified themselves as ethnic Germans. The authorities threatened actors with death if they did not perform.

The German medical contribution
to the atrocities in Poland was advertised for posterity in a collection of reports titled
Kampf den Seuchen: Deutsche Ärzte-Einsatz im Osten
(Fighting epidemics: German Medical Missions in the East), published in Kraków in 1941. The book is a farrago of lies, racism, cheap shots, and cruelty—the opposite of everything scientific medicine stands for. Contributors included the health director Walbaum and the well-known infectious disease and
Geomedizin
specialist Ernst G. Nauck. In a series of essays, the German doctors blamed Poland’s growing health problems on the ignorance and cupidity of Jews and Poles, in doing so revealing their own culpability.
One writer, Joseph Ruppert
, a senior health adviser for the
Generalgouvernement
in Kraków, described Jews as “criminal types, whom one could expect anything, so you unconsciously reach for your pistol to have it ready to shoot at any time.” The lack of water in Warsaw in the wake of Luftwaffe bombing of the city’s waterworks—“for which the Poles with their criminal defense policies are themselves entirely to blame”—meant that more epidemics would be coming, he wrote. “Since the Jew alone is almost always the carrier of the epidemic, and in the sickening of non-Jews there is always a Jewish infection source to be found, it has been urgent for the protection of the population to limit the movement of the Jewish population.”
A Dr. Werner Kroll wrote
that the Jew was “by nature filthy, has no sense for the aesthetic-hygienic demands of bodily cleanliness. . . . The Jew has absolutely no productive thought and no intellectual interests beyond those required for the practical goal of moneymaking.” In Kroll’s view, the eradication of the Jew alone would be insufficient to put medicine on the right track.
What was needed
was a priestly doctor class that opposed the Judeo-Christian worldview of mercy and didn’t worry about individuals, but “served the eternal life of the unending bloodline of blood pulsing through the body and soul of the [German] people.”