The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (27 page)

The Lwów institute teemed
with underground activity hidden behind the façade of vaccine production and invisible to those who didn’t need to know. The details usually did not go through Weigl, who, though involved in shipping vaccine illegally to the ghettos, spent much of his time pursuing scientific experiments—on the infectivity of feces, on possible egg cultures of typhus, on epidemiology—and his archery. All the hiring went through Anna Herzig, his tough assistant, girlfriend, and future wife, and she was abreast of all conspiracies. Just after the German occupation, an aristocratic Catholic intellectual named Stanisława Grabska arrived from Warsaw. She had grown up in Lwów, on an estate that had been confiscated and converted to Wehrmacht housing. London had sent her back to Lwów to unify the Warsaw and Galician commands of the Home Army. Some in the institute knew about her mission, but there were no leaks, and she fulfilled it safely. At the institute, her job was to dissect infected lice.

Louse feeding was an effective
cover for an underground activist. It justified at least two departures from the house during the day and provided free time for underground activities. The many Home Army louse feeders included the district chief, Army Major Karol Borkowiec, the university docent Stefania Skwarczy
ska, who managed underground publications, and a leading conspirator named Tadeusz Gali
ski. About half the dissectors were resistance members, led by the veterinarian Lesław Ogielski. “Almost the entire leadership of the conspiracy was there,”
uławski recalled of his days in the institute. “The [London] government-in-exile delegate for the region fed every morning with me. His closest colleague, Wanda, often fed lice for me when I could not come, because she was a healthy, pretty girl and not afraid to get anemia. I am convinced that the professor was informed about the underground, but despite the fact that the Gestapo and Wehrmacht guarded the entrance, he never lost his cool. We often saw him relaxing in the garden, shooting his bow. Archery was his passion.”

Jerzy Sokolowski, who
had been a military officer based in Lwów and who joined the resistance after Poland’s defeat, was parachuted into Poland by the British in March 1942 to conduct sabotage behind German lines. Sokolowski met Weigl in Lwów and arranged for vaccines to be shipped to him under a German officer’s name in Smolensk, Russia, where typhus was killing members of the Home Army.

Wacław Szybalski also sometimes carried out missions for the resistance. In 1943, the Home Army ordered him to draw up a map of the railroad station at Belzec, the final destination for hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews, so that Allies could bomb the station. Szybalski and a friend rode their bicycles to the death camp, a distance of about 60 miles through the countryside. He remembered coming over a hill on a beautiful day. “Just as we were approaching Belzec, we encountered this sickening smell, really strong.” A smell of burning human bodies. The friend had contacts in the area who helped them map it so that American or English bombers could destroy the station and prevent transports from reaching the camp. Szybalski drew up a map, and later saw black marketeers trading in gold recovered from murdered Jews’ fillings. Their report went to Jan Karski, the famous courier, and from him to Churchill and Roosevelt. “Unfortunately none of them was really interested in helping Polish Jews and nobody acted on it,” said Szybalski. “Our mission was a total waste.”

Bitter as such experiences were, they did not discourage all of the young Poles. Some mornings, as he sat with his legs stretched out on a bench, Mirosław
uławski would imagine that the boxes on his calves were “like little life jackets that were keeping the resistance movement out of deep waters.” Work at the institute provided an unheard-of security for people like him. From time to time, German officials came to
uławski’s house with the intention of seizing furniture. “I always greeted them politely, and asked whether they’d been vaccinated against typhus, because unfortunately, typhus-infected lice crawled over me every day. I never saw one of those Germans again.”

The junior Weigl
institute employees were cautious around their German supervisors, but the older ones felt a degree of trust in Hermann Eyer, although, as one stated, “you never knew if this was because of his heart, or because he realized the Third Reich wouldn’t last forever.”
German officers who
worked for Eyer stated that none of the vaccine was ever sabotaged—evidence, they said, of the goodwill the Polish workers had toward their humanitarian boss.
But while it
is true that Eyer and the Germans were viewed as a generally civilized bunch, the Poles did conduct sabotage. A low-key sort took place in the rooms of the dissectors. Their daily production norm was 1,600 lice in six hours. Working longer than that was impossible because of the intense concentration required. But it turned out that if you dissected 1,200 or 1,300 lice, then warmed the bowl of louse guts with your hands, it would increase its size, so that it looked like 1,600 guts and was viewed as such by those who ground up and neutralized the emulsion. “This trick was used only for the vaccine that went to the German Wehrmacht,” one dissector wrote. “The containers we prepared for Professor Weigl—for the Polish or Jewish underground—had to contain the correct amount.”

Eyer permitted Weigl
a private supply of 200 doses of vaccine each month to vaccinate his employees and their families, or anyone else he chose. A total of 8,000 doses more were used for “vaccine trials,” whose “volunteers” included orphans, underground combatants, and the faculty of the Roman Catholic seminary in Lwów. Larger amounts, like the 30,000 doses that went to the Warsaw ghetto, were off the books. Clever bookkeeping allowed extensive pilferage great and small. Once a
Volksdeutscher
employed in the warehouse surprised the Weigl aide Jan Starzyk by telling him, “Will you please ask them to steal only one dose at a time instead of the whole set? Otherwise someone is going to notice.” Starzyk added, “I didn’t know who ‘they’ were. I didn’t have to know.”
Others falsified bills
of lading in order to save vaccine for the Home Army or the ghetto. Employees entered the lab over the weekend to gather up louse feces from the cages to make vaccine. It contained high concentrations of typhus germs, but the Germans didn’t include the waste in their account books. Sometimes, the louse feces were used in a form of sabotage—smeared on the headrests of the German-only passenger railroad cars with the hope of infecting and debilitating Nazi officers.

Woman and typhus-afflicted child in the Warsaw ghetto, 1942. (Courtesy United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.)

Eyer’s deputy in Lwów
, Josef Daniels, once came by a vaccine filling room and noticed that the number of intestines in each lot was fewer than noted in the records. He said to Zbigniew Stuchly, “Thank God the Wehrmacht runs this place. If this were discovered by the SS there would be terrible consequences.” This warning was often repeated by the Wehrmacht officers. The German in charge of the Potocki Street facility told Starzyk, “Don’t do anything to attract the Gestapo. Once they get in, we’re all lost.”

Some of the dissector units were made up entirely of women, and in a gradually warming atmosphere of trust and friendship, they would talk, listen to music on a gramophone, and even dance in the hall. A German walked by one day and joked that the “Typhus Institute” had become the “Typhus Cabaret.” Not all the Germans thought that was funny. But Eyer had a hands-off attitude toward the Weigl lab, and some of the men he put in place to oversee it were happy to have a laugh. Eyer was a regular churchgoer, which was frowned upon among the Nazi brass.
Six of his lab assistants
and guards were priests, and other openly religious Catholics served on his staff. The Gestapo in Kraków referred to the institute as “the parson’s seminary.” But Eyer’s success in producing vaccine buffered him from the menacing SS. In 1941, Eyer was relaxed enough to bring his wife from Berlin to Kraków, where she spent a month working as a feeder of healthy lice. They vacationed in the mountain resort of Zakopane, where Peter, their first child, was conceived. Eyer treated the Kraków and Lwów louse feeders as blood donors and provided them increased food rations. They received the highest wage allowed in the
Generalgouvernement
, with various bonuses. The institute’s doctors provided free medical care.