The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (23 page)

Fleck spent the first
year and a half of the Nazi occupation running the bacteriological lab at the Kuszewicz hospital. In September 1941, Ukrainian militiamen threw the Flecks out of their apartment and robbed them of everything except a bundle of bed linen and kitchen utensils. The Flecks paid 10,000 zlotys (about $20,000 at the time) to a Pole to rent his apartment a few blocks from the ghetto hospital, but after taking the money he remained in the apartment with them, and eventually they were forced to leave. Fleck, his wife, Ernestyna, and son, Ryszard, lived for a while in the hospital itself, under the protection of its director, Dr. Maksymilian Kurzrock. Later they found a room nearby at Wybranowski 4, sharing it with two other families. In a January 1942
Aktion
, Fleck lost his sisters, Antonina Fleck-Silber and Henryka Fleck-Kessler, who had been teachers at the Vocational School for Jewish Girls in Lwów. They were murdered with their husbands at Janowska.

It may have been
at this point that Weigl intervened on behalf of his former assistant. There is no written record of an interaction, but sometime later in 1942, the Flecks and his assistants were identified as employees of the Lemberg branch of Eyer’s
Institut fur Fleckfieber und Virus Forschung
. Szybalski has reported that Fleck worked at the Weigl institute as a louse feeder, but Fleck’s postwar writings say nothing of this, and it seems unlikely. Both of the Weigl institute buildings were more than a two-mile walk from the ghetto, and the Wehrmacht prohibited Jews from working in them.
However, Fleck did meet
with Weigl at least once during this period, and Weigl provided him with vaccines and lab equipment. Fleck’s colleague from his private practice, Olga Elster, joined him in the lab at Kuszewicz Street for a while. Her husband, Edward, ran another ghetto hospital, on Zamarstynowska Street.
A while later
, another colleague joined them—Anna Seeman, a Vienna-educated scientist-physician who knew Fleck from the Social Security Hospital. Seeman was a gifted microbiologist who walked with a limp as a result of a childhood case of polio. Her husband, Jakob, an engineer and Hebrew scholar, had injured his hand and was given a job as a laboratory technician for protection. Their 10-year-old son, Bronisław, or Bruno, spent months on top of a water heater in the laboratory, hiding from Gestapo raids. Ryszard Fleck, 16, worked at his parents’ side as a lab technician.

As the weather turned
cold in late 1941, typhus broke out in the unheated dwellings of the beaten-down Jewish ghetto. A disease that Fleck knew from the First World War now added its monotonous terror to the other threats of annihilation. A dozen or more people were stuffed into each ghetto apartment room. The possibilities of bathing or cleaning one’s clothes were very limited. Everyone was hungry, and many were starving. “That typhus should quickly spread in these circumstances,” wrote Fleck, “was no wonder.”
The outbreak began
in a Soviet POW camp the Nazis had created at the Citadel, a 19th-century Austro-Hungarian barracks.
That winter
, there were thousands of cases; a year later, Fleck estimated that 70 percent of the ghetto residents had been infected with the disease. The German doctors responded to the epidemic with utter perversity.

The pattern had been
established in Warsaw, occupied since September 1939, where German public health officials at first tried to fight the disease by requiring Jews to submit to delousing baths and quarantines. These measures were impractical and punitive. Delousing meant standing naked in the freezing cold while one’s apartment was searched and often robbed, and handing over a precious set of clothes likely to be damaged by powerful chemicals. A Warsaw public health official estimated that only a fifth of all typhus cases were being reported to his officers.
Frank, the German
emperor of Poland, ordered that to prevent spread of the disease, Jews trying to sneak out of the ghetto were to be shot. At a conference of 100 Nazi health officers at a Carpathian spa in October 1941, the issue came to a head with the intervention of Robert Kudicke, who had taken over the Polish Institute of Hygiene from Ludwik Hirszfeld. Speaking “purely academically without making any value judgment,” Kudicke said, “the Jewish population simply breaks out of the ghettos because there is nothing to eat. . . . If one wants to prevent that in the future, then one must use the best means for this, namely provide for more sufficient provisioning.” Jost Walbaum, the medical chief for occupied Poland, gave the following retort:

Naturally it would be best and simplest to give the people sufficient provisions, but that cannot be done. This is connected to the food situation and the war situation in general. Thus shooting will be employed when one comes across a Jew outside the ghetto without special permission. One must say it quite openly in this circle, be clear about it. There are only two ways. We sentence the Jews in the ghetto to death by hunger or we shoot them. Even if the end result is the same, the latter is more intimidating. We cannot do otherwise, even if we want to. We have one and only one responsibility, that the German people are not infected and endangered by these parasites. For that any means must be right.

Here, then, was the German medical community’s offer to Polish Jews: die of starvation and typhus in the ghetto, or die by shooting. The loyalty of the German medical profession to authority and its adherence to Nazi ideology seem to have kept any humane solutions from entering their heads. Occasionally the doctors were cruel, and occasionally they were corrupt. But for the most part they were “honorable,” on their own terms—hideously impassive in the face of a genocide that they blamed on the victims. Even assuming that most of them did not, at least in the early stages of the war, envision the complete annihilation of the Jews, their membership in the thought collective caused them to tread forward like sleepwalkers. This was groupthink in its most hideous form.

Hirszfeld, who had been
ousted from his job by Kudicke and Nauck, was shocked at the stupidity of the German antityphus measures. Posters told everyone who found a louse on himself to report to a physician, and required the reporting of every case of fever. Science had long before abolished such medieval quarantine practices, Hirszfeld said, because in addition to being cruel, they were useless. “But since in this case the point was to liquidate the Jews and not the epidemic as such,” he added, “quarantines turned out to be quite useful.”

On April 24, 1943
, Heinrich Himmler gave a speech to an assembly of SS officers: “Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology,” he told them. “It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, anti-Semitism, for us, has not been a question of ideology, but a matter of cleanliness, which now will soon have been dealt with. We shall soon be deloused. We have only 20,000 lice left, and then the matter is finished within the whole of Germany.”

A few months before the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, friends rescued Hirszfeld, and he lived out the war concealed in the country house of Polish aristocrats, where he wrote a memoir. He did not spare the German doctors under whom he had been forced to serve. “If in the institute that I had a part in molding there now works Mr. Nauck and Mr. Kudicke, whereas I—expelled—pine for my workplace: who is the parasite, I or they? And who is profiting from someone else’s work?” In the ghetto, there had been little Hirszfeld could do to slow the epidemic. “The wonderful Dr. Weigl,” he wrote, secretly sent him large quantities of vaccine. But the shots were available only to a tiny minority. The
Generalgouvernement
had given Kudicke 50 million zlotys to combat the typhus epidemic when it spread beyond the ghetto in 1942; the only part allotted to the Jews was an 8,000-zloty disinfecting sprayer.

Hirszfeld created a makeshift medical school in the ghetto, and one of the topics discussed in his immunology class was the question “Are the Jews really a separate race?” His answer: No. Blood-typing research—Hirszfeld was one of the world’s experts—proved that Jews had always mingled with the nations where they dwelt. The idea was controversial among the rabbinate, but the students were fascinated. “After the lecture, several of them came up to me and told me with overflowing emotions: ‘We thank you. We feel that you have taken the curse from us. . . . [I]t seemed to me that I was fulfilling the duty of a teacher who was showing new roads to his pupils, roads beset with difficulties but also offering a hope for a better future.” At the very edge of civilization, where millions were paying for the world’s insane obsession with race, a lonely man shone a lantern of scientific truth. “Unfortunately,” Hirszfeld wrote, “I was speaking to human beings sentenced to extermination.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

T
HE
F
ANTASTIC
L
ABORATORY OF
D
R.
W
EIGL

Feeding lice to make vaccine. (Courtesy of Emil-von-Behring-Bibliothek, Philipps-Universität Marburg.)

T
he Weigl institute was a mysterious labyrinth of science and deception during the German occupation. Its visible structure was odd enough, organized as it was around the somewhat gruesome production scheme of the vaccine. “
Its base was the farmers
, who grew the lice from eggs, watched their development and cleaned their cages, for the louse does not tolerate dirt,” wrote the novelist and poet Mirosław
uławski in a memoir. “The feeders built the next part of the pyramid, and they were divided into two categories: the higher aristocracy who fed infected lice and the plebes, like me, who fed the healthy ones.” Only those who had suffered through a bout of typhus were allowed to feed the typhus-infected lice, and they received double wages. “Next came the injectors, and then the preparers. At the top of the pyramid stood The Professor—the high priest of typhus magic.”

After a feeding. (Courtesy of National Museum, Przemy
l. Photograph of original by S. Kosiedowski.)

Weigl had ingeniously brought together several mechanical, chemical, and biological steps in the creation of the vaccine, and its mass production relied on an intricate set of standards and conditions. The process was arcane and appeared nightmarish from outside the lab; inside, however, its peculiarity was cherished, for it created a space of peace and relative freedom in the hell of occupied Lwów. Under wartime conditions in 1941 the scaling up of the vaccine production was a remarkable technical feat.
The tens of millions
of lice used in the vaccine during the war descended from a cross between lice gathered from the clothing of Russians in Austrian POW camps during World War I, and an Ethiopian variety that Weigl had obtained in Addis Ababa. The new creature was designated the “Weigl strain.”