The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (21 page)

“
I heard the howling
, the yelling, the giggling of the beasts,” recalled a Jewish businessman who worked in downtown Lwów. “They tore our skin and muscles, beat out eyes, broke bones, beat on our heads, shoulders, and arms. . . . The streets were crammed full of onlookers resembling humans.”

Staff at Weigl’s
laboratory saw Ukrainians and SS herding hundreds of Jews through the streets with whips and sticks. There was a strong element of sexual humiliation involved; elegant women were stripped naked and beaten until blood poured from their faces. Dr. Stefan Kry
ski, who was spending nights in the Weigl lab to avoid the violence, took in a few of the victims and treated their wounds. “I had no particular sympathy for the Jews, especially after their behavior under Soviet rule,” Kry
ski, then an old man, wrote in 1994, “but I had never imagined that men could be so cruel to fellow human beings simply because of their nation or race. Unfortunately, what we saw in July was only a rehearsal for an enormous spectacle of death.”

Pogrom in Lwów, July 1, 1941. (Courtesy of the Wiener Library.)

Rabbi Ezekiel Lewin, leader of the Reform temple in Lwów, had just visited his friend Andrzej Graf Szeptycki, the Greek Catholic archbishop, seeking help in calming the Ukrainians. Szeptycki, who lived in a spacious palace, pleaded with Lewin to stay with him, but the rabbi insisted on returning to his people. He was seized at the doorstep of his house and dragged to Saint Brigid’s, where a carnival of violence and horror awaited. Naked Jews, men, women, and children, knelt on the cobblestones washing away blood, or dragged bodies into the courtyard, driven by whips, kicks, and blows from German and Ukrainian rifle butts. The smell of the week-old corpses, rotting in temperatures that soared above 90 degrees, was unbearable.
A firing squad
shoved Rabbi Lewin into a corner and shot him along with a physician, Dr. Perec Gleich, and Henryk Hescheles, editor of the liberal Polish-language daily
Chwila
(Moment). It was the beginning of the end of assimilated Lwów Jewry.

A Nazi propaganda film
made in early July shows Ukrainian children and women, babushkas in head scarves, keening and weeping over hundreds of bodies laid out in a yard. “Nothing stopped these monsters in human form,” says the narrator. “With machine guns, knives, axes, and hand grenades these innocent victims of Bolshevik death-lust were cruelly murdered.” The next frames show the faces of Jews, swollen from beatings. “The murderous Jewish rabble, who worked hand in hand with the Soviet GPU, were delivered to German troops for punishment by an angry crowd.” The Nazis wholly invented the idea that Jews had murdered the Ukrainians, but it was crassly effective propaganda within the brutal circumstances. “
We could see them beating Jews
in the street from our windows,” recalled Alex Redner, whose father, Marek, was a leading internist in Lwów. “My father was going out to bandage people half dead in the street. The wounded came to his office for help. Street mobs were running after Jews. That was the preamble. From that point on we had hardly a day of peace and quiet. From the day the Germans arrived, it was like being a rat trapped at the bottom of a pit.”

The number of Jews murdered
in the inaugural spate of violence in Lwów has been put at 4,000 to 7,000. On July 25, another blood rite was arranged for the Ukrainians: three days of violence to commemorate a Russian Jew’s 1926 murder of the Ukrainian leader Symon Petlura in Paris. An estimated 2,000 Jews died in the “Petlura Days.” The Germans unleashed wave upon wave of violence during the following two years, campaigns in which Ukrainians and Nazis, sometimes assisted by Jewish militiamen, descended upon a neighborhood to arrest and kill and deport to the death camps. Each of these
Aktionen,
as they were called, left anywhere from a few thousand to 50,000 dead. From one
Aktion
to another, things calmed down. In these periods of relative inaction, the Jews were subject to daily harassment, beatings, blackmail, and murder, over a background of starvation, terror, depression, and disease.

The first pogroms were followed by an avalanche of Nazi legal orders that left the Jewish community no time to recover or organize. No radios or telephones, no employment of Aryans by Jews, no school for Jewish children, no Jews at food markets or public places of any kind, no Jews on the streetcars or railroads, no Jewish prayer.
The last order
was accompanied by the burning of most of the city’s synagogues, including the 16th-century Golden Rose, with its alabaster Gothic arches. Jews were stripped of everything they owned and ordered to wear blue-on-white Star-of-David armbands.

Hitler had ordered
the elimination of the Polish intelligentsia, but more than half the Kraków professors arrested at the Jagiellonian University in 1939 were free within a few months. Some of them even began teaching again, in an underground university that was attended by students such as Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II. This made the German leadership unhappy. “The trouble we had with the Kraków professors was terrible,” said Hans Frank, the Nazi overlord of Poland, in May 1940. “If we’d been responsible for the thing, it’d have gone differently. If someone is suspicious, we liquidate him immediately.”

Things went differently
in Lwów.
Überführer
Eberhard Schöngarth, leader of one of the soon-to-be-notorious SS killing squads, arrived in the city on July 2, 1941, three days behind the Wehrmacht. He brought his unit directly to Saint Brigid’s prison to view the carnage left by the Soviet occupiers. The SS men were told that some of the victims were German pilots, murdered by Jews. Some of the corpses had been dressed in German uniforms. It seemed that even a death squad needed to gin up some moral indignation in order to murder old men.

The next night, the commando raided two dozen apartments and houses in the nicer quarters of Lwów and kidnapped 26 leading university professors from Jan Kasimir University and the Lwów Polytechnical, along with 26 other people who happened to be present—wives, children, relatives, and unlucky house visitors. They were driven to a former school for orphans on the south side of town, in an area called the Wulka Hills. The old professors were shoved against a wall, questioned, and beaten. The violence was at once methodical and random—a mixture of purposeful torture and pure sadism. After a few hours, gunmen herded the first group of 15 out of the building. Among them were the 69-year-old Stanisław Ruff, chairman of the surgery department at the Lazarus Hospital, on Rappaport Street, and his 55-year-old wife, Anna. They carried the body of their 30-year-old son, Adam, whom the Nazis had gunned down while he suffered an epileptic fit. The SS led the group down the street and into a park. Half an hour later came automatic rifle fire. Soon another group was taken, and then two more, the last as the sun was rising. The killers lined their victims up at the edge of a pit dug a few hours earlier by Ukrainians. They ordered the old men to turn around, and shot them so that they fell facedown in the pit.

The pediatrician Franciszek Groër
, Weigl’s close friend and Fleck’s boss at the time, was among those arrested that night. After ransacking his house for jewelry, artworks, and cash, however, the SS officer in charge discovered that Groër’s wife, Cecilia Cumming, was a titled British woman. For some reason, this gave him pause. The Nazis released Groër at daybreak and told him to go home. He was the only survivor of the arrests. Afterwards, the SS looted and seized the apartments of the slain professors. A Dutch businessman who had lived in Lwów before the war and knew its social contours led the SS to plunderable artworks and attractive houses. Few of the valuables were ever recovered. The dead included 18 department chairmen, many of them leading national figures in mathematics, engineering, chemistry, and medicine. Włodzimierz Sto
ek, the barrel-shaped mathematics chair and regular at the Scottish Café, died with his wife and son.
The dapper playwright
and feuilletoniste Tadeusz Boy-
ele
ski, one of the first prominent Poles to advocate the legalization of abortion, was another victim. Boy-
ele
ski was the voice of French literature in Polish, having translated more than 100 French works. He was a celebrated and beloved anticonformist, left-wing democrat, and tweaker of traditional Polish mores. He had the misfortune that night to have been visiting a doctor on Schöngarth’s list.