The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (28 page)

For all that
, Eyer could be punitive. Odo Bujwid, a renowned Polish microbiologist who many years earlier had founded the Kraków institute Eyer now occupied, ran a private vaccine laboratory with his daughter, Sofia. As the risk of typhus increased in 1941, they decided to create a vaccine for use by Poles. Sofia Bujwid personally collected lice off a group of alcoholics outside a church to start the project, and hired louse feeders to produce a Weigl-style vaccine. When the lab was ready, in May 1941, she sent her teenage son to Eyer’s assistant, Zdzisław Przybyłkiewicz, to purchase two Wehrmacht vaccines to use in quality checks. Eyer had the boy arrested, then visited Bujwid and told her he had had no choice, because the vaccine was only for the German army. Furthermore, Eyer forbade the Bujwids, under threat of arrest, to have future contact with Przybyłkiewicz. Sofia Bujwid’s son ended up in Auschwitz, but was later released, and the Bujwids resumed making their own vaccine.

The Jews of Kraków
suffered the same terrible fate as Jews elsewhere in Poland; Eyer said after the war that he simply did not believe the reports he heard about deportations and mass murder. The 70,000 Jews crammed into the Kraków ghetto, in dwellings built for a quarter that number, endured terrible typhus outbreaks with no help from the Wehrmacht, which maintained strict control of their movements.
In early 1944
, the Gestapo liquidated the Jewish medical service in Kraków, murdering the remaining doctors and shooting patients in their beds. Of the 190 Jewish doctors who had lived in the city when war broke out in 1939, 142 died in the ghetto or in concentration camps.

After showing the factory owner
Schwanenberg his vaccine, Fleck was ordered to report to Gestapo headquarters on Pełczy
ska Street—the most feared building in Lwów. “The way there was more dangerous than typhus,” Fleck said. “A Jew seldom returned living from that address.” Fleck, accompanied by the Jewish hospital director Maksymilian Kurzrock, brought experimental designs, diagrams, and samples. Some uniformed medical specialists questioned them in the presence of the Gestapo. The specialists wrote things down, repeated questions, Fleck said, and “shouted at us and threatened us. Some of the questions were not very intelligent. For example, they asked if the vaccine would work for Aryans. I replied, ‘Of course, but it must be made from Aryan and not Jewish urine.’” The specialists did not respond to Fleck’s sarcasm, if indeed they understood that it was sarcasm, but decided to send the samples to Professor Richard Otto, the leading German typhus expert, in Frankfurt. “We left the room and weren’t sure if we’d get out of the building alive, since they had the samples and the protocols,” Fleck wrote. “They didn’t need us anymore even if the vaccine interested them. However, they let us go, and outside there was only the usual daily risk.”

A week later
, a German commission led by Professor Kudicke came to inspect the ghetto laboratory. The German military was in a growing panic over the lack of vaccines for its troops, who were beginning to contract the disease on the eastern front in large numbers. Kudicke treated Fleck rudely, sitting at a desk while the Jewish doctor stood in front of him describing his methods. The Nazi doctors watched Fleck’s team making antigen and then went away. Later the Gestapo sent an official to watch over them. He promised that sick patients who brought in urine would be described as “urine donors” and not threatened with liquidation. The lab workers got a special ID card that said, “involved in the production of typhus vaccine,” which gave them a feeling of security.

Production moved to the Laokoon factory. Sterilized, refrigerated urine from hospitalized typhus patients was poured into 50-liter metal flasks sent to Laokoon every day. The factory had an excellent apparatus to concentrate and filter the antigen, which was combined with aluminum hydroxide, a protein stabilizer and immune system stimulator that is still used in many vaccines, including the DTP shot that prevents whooping cough, tetanus, and diphtheria.
A number of Polish and
Jewish scientists worked at the plant. The chemist Janina Opie
ska-Blauth had been ordered to find ways to remove the bitterness of horse chestnuts so that they could be used as food. Others were devising hormonal preparations from animal organ extracts. According to Opie
ska-Blauth’s account, Fleck and his team were somehow known to be on Professor Weigl’s staff. The Germans were so worried by typhus, she said, that they were even protecting and feeding Jews with expertise on the subject. Schwanenberg was not particularly friendly, but wanted to keep his Jewish employees from being swept up in raids, so he ordered them to live on the factory grounds. This edict offered welcome protection. Out on the streets, each day the occupation grew more dangerous. The SS wanted to finish off the business of killing the Jews, and the Gestapo were less and less likely to respect a Jew’s work papers.

Finally, after
about eight months of work, the vaccine was ready for human testing. On August 28, 1942, Fleck injected himself. “Aug. 29,” he wrote in his notebook, “large area of local edema and redness; August 30, the reaction vanishes.” Fleck also vaccinated his wife, child, and two other people, and a week later Dr. Edward Elster injected 32 volunteers with the vaccine at the Zamarstynowska hospital. “The local reaction was slightly painful, no general reaction was observed,” Fleck wrote. Afterward Fleck vaccinated about 500 inmates at Janowska under the supervision of Dr. Kurzrock, who had a protector in the Gestapo, an officer whose wife he had treated.

The “vaccine trial” came at
one of the most dramatic moments in the history of Lwów. The Jewish population, somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 before the German invasion, was now roughly half that size as a result of killings and deportations, starvation, typhus, and other diseases. On August 1, Hans Frank said, “With insect powder and other necessary articles, we’re going to make this a place where a German man can live again, after we get rid of the rest of the Jews.”
A few days later
, the Nazis began their largest murder campaign in Lwów. Raids intensified on the Jewish hospitals. Unlike previous actions, these saw the Nazis kill the patients and also most of the doctors, including Olga Elster and her husband, Edward.

In all, about 50,000
Jews were slaughtered in the August action. Dr. Dopheide, the district medical chief, arrived at the Zamarstynowska hospital while it was being raided.
After the SS
had taken out the doctors, Dopheide and his aides entered the building and stole its equipment. Dopheide never paid any consequences for his actions. In postwar testimony, he said he was “ordered to take part in such actions in which people were driven together and forcibly deloused. Whether such people, especially Jews, were then taken away, I cannot say. The Jewish measures were not disclosed to us.” On September 1, the final day of the action, a Gestapo spy was found dead near the ghetto. The Gestapo concluded he had been killed by the Jews and in revenge dragged 12 members of the Jewish council from their offices. They were hanged from the balconies of houses along Łokietka Street. The ropes were thin and most of the men fell, while still alive, and broke limbs. One of them had to be hanged three times before he died.

Again, Fleck clung to life. Kurzrock’s Gestapo connection provided a few dozen doctors with new stamps for their passports. Some chose to join their families in death at Janowska. Fleck survived and continued his trial vaccinations on the doomed inmates at the camp, hoping they would be protected from typhus. The shot’s value was never evaluated, however, because the vaccinated inmates were murdered in the following weeks.
Kurzrock survived for
a while longer. The following summer, the SS officer who had always promised to protect him invited Kurzrock to his villa and shot him in the head.

On September 7, the ghetto
was sealed, but a small clinic continued to operate where typhus patients were treated and some were vaccinated. In late 1944, the first description of Nazi-occupied Lwów appeared in an account by Adolf Folkmann, an escapee who told his story to a Swedish political scientist. Folkmann’s account, entitled
The Promise Hitler Kept
, included a brief account of Fleck’s vaccine. “Dr. Fleck produced his serum at the risk of his life and injected as many Jews as possible. When the German authorities learned of this, they arrested Dr. Fleck and his assistants. They forced those arrested to instruct several German doctors in the production of the new serum, at which point the discoverers of the serum disappeared from the city.” According to Folkmann, Fleck and his assistants had all been murdered.
Dr. Franciszek Groër, Fleck’s
boss, also believed Fleck had died, for in early 1945 he published a brief research note by his former employee, with an asterisk noting that Fleck had passed away in 1942.

One afternoon in 1942
, a young lab worker named Tomasz Cieszy
ski knocked on the door of Weigl’s office and entered. Weigl had been pacing the room and talking, but stopped when he saw the young man. Anna Herzig, sitting at the opposite end of the room, lost her temper and shouted, “Go away at once!” Weigl came over to Cieszy
ski and said, “Sit down and don’t disturb us.” Then he resumed the conversation. Stacked in the corner was a pile of boxes full of vaccine, headed for the Warsaw ghetto. The discussion Cieszy
ski overheard concerned how the institute would smuggle them in to Hirszfeld. When it was over, Weigl turned to Cieszy
ski: “Go home,” he said, “and keep this a secret.”