The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (45 page)

In March 1948
, Weigl was transferred to the medical university in Pozna
, but he rarely showed up for his lectures and soon retired. Next, he set up a small research center in Kraków, but it was subject to state control, and the vaccine made there was labeled as if it had been produced by the National Institute of Hygiene. Each autumn, Weigl and his staff worried that the health ministry would cut their contract. His nephew, Fryderyk Weigl, summed up Weigl’s treatment in the postwar era thus: “
The Germans had offered
him a chair in Berlin, the Russians an institute in Moscow. The Poles gave my uncle a small appartment on Sebastian Street and a lot of political headaches. This is a difficult thing. Very sad.”

Eyer felt disappointment
rather than anger toward Przybyłkiewicz, who he suspected was simply a weak man trying to make a career for himself in a difficult situation. Eyer wrote to a friend, “The world is bad. It was bad what the Germans did during the war, and bad what the Poles are doing now to me and my Polish colleagues. Why is the world so bad?”

Despite all he had done
to hold his family together during the war, history had one final trick to play on Ludwik Fleck. As a 20-year-old citizen of a city that Stalin had declared capital of western Soviet Ukraine, Ryszard Fleck in April 1945 was immediately drafted into the Red Army and trucked from Buchenwald to a mustering site in Chemnitz, Germany. He found himself the only Jew in a group of Russian and Ukrainain farmers who’d been sent to Germany as slave laborers. A Soviet general harangued them for “cooperating” with the Germans and said they would need to be rehabilitated before they could return home. Since by then it was harvest time, they would redeem themselves by bringing in the German wheat, after which they would be drafted into the army. Everyone enthusiastically cheered, “Long live Stalin!”

After several months, Ryszard fell ill—he had developed tuberculosis in the camps—and was mustered out of the Red Army. In early 1946, he finally arrived in Lwów to find the city nearly empty of friends and acquaintances. His old house was occupied by Russian soldiers; his parents had come and gone and were living in Lublin, a city in central Poland. Ernestyna had arrived first in Lwów, after surviving the Auschwitz death march and Ravensbruck concentration camp. Ludwik, after spending a month in the infirmary at Buchenwald and several more weeks in a hospital halfway home, had gone immediately to see his old mentor Groër. He found Ernestyna waiting for him in the doctor’s anteroom. In the statement he gave years later at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, Ryszard spoke little of being reunited with his parents. Certainly there were strains—Ryszard had never been a good student, and had nothing of his father’s charm or intellect. Enduring the misery and terror of the war years had not brightened his prospects. After receiving a high school diploma in Lublin, Ryszard registered for a kibbutz and left for Germany, where he was held in a displaced persons (DP) camp for a year before being smuggled to Sète, France. There, in early July 1947, he and 4,500 other Holocaust survivors boarded the American steamer
President Warfield
. Halfway through its famous voyage, the ship was rechristened
Exodus
. Two Jews died fighting British troops who boarded the
Exodus
near Palestine, and global news coverage of the combat, between British riot troops and miserable refugees, ignited a wave of sympathy for the Jews and their desire for a homeland. (In 1960,
Exodus
became a film epic directed by Otto Preminger, with Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint, and a famous score by Ernest Gold.) At Haifa, the British removed the refugees and returned them to Germany. When he finally got to Israel, Ryszard lived on a kibbutz and then worked in a lab at a hospital in Petach Tikva. Once his father had said to him, “Never have children, because it will break your heart trying to protect them.” Ryszard obeyed.

The fate of Fleck’s
Lwów team was mixed and at times heartbreaking. Bruno and Anna Seeman were separated from her husband, Jakob, and assumed for many months that he was dead. Finally he found them, in Kraków. The Umschweifs had perished. “Dad always said, he didn’t eat the grass and that’s why he survived,” Bruno Seeman recalled.
The Seemans ended up
in France, where Bruno would become an engineer, with many patents to his name, for the multinational oil field company Schlumberger. He moved frequently, from France to Texas to the Mideast and elsewhere. His friends in the company called him “the Wandering Jew.”

Ciepielowski, the chief
of the vaccine-making crew at Buchenwald’s Block 50, made the best of a difficult life. For two years, he worked as a doctor for refugees in the American zone in Germany. At one point, a large German pharmaceutical company approached him about production of the rabbit-lung vaccine, asking for his help. The laboratory was following the instructions Ding had published in 1944, the company official said, but the lungs yielded no
Rickettsia
. Ciepielowski explained, with a laugh, that the vaccine had never been meant to protect anyone.
He would marry
a beautiful Polish woman and emigrate to New Jersey, where he was a doctor at Roosevelt Hospital in Metuchen. He died in 1972 of a lung disease contracted at Buchenwald.

Another Block 50
inmate, the former Communist activist August Cohn, also emigrated to the United States, but had a rougher time of it. After working with U.S. occupation forces to hunt Nazis in the Kassel area, Cohn despaired of European communism and moved to New York in late 1946, at age 36. Two years later, while working as a cabinetmaker, he was arrested for allegedly failing to identify himself as a former Communist in his immigration papers. This was untrue; Cohn had never hidden his past from U.S. officials. But it was the height of the McCarthy era, and some of those diplomats did not want to admit what they had known. After a long and expensive legal battle, Cohn was permitted to remain in the United States.

Eugen Kogon helped found the Christian Democratic Union, Germany’s most influential postwar political party, but left it in the early 1950s because of his opposition to the stationing of U.S. nuclear weapons on German soil. His portrait of camp life,
The Theory and Practice of Hell
, sold 300,000 copies in Germany and was translated into 11 languages. He was a well-known figure on German talk shows and newspaper feuilletons. In later years, Kogon grew bitter over the country’s rush to forget the past. He was “an angry old man” who couldn’t stomach the moral levity of consumerist Germany.

Unlikely friendships sprang
up in the scorched soil of Germany. In November 1950, the Block 46 capo Arthur Dietzsch was released from an American prison where he’d been sentenced for his part in the typhus experiments. He wrote to his former conspirator at Buchenwald, the British “White Rabbit,” Wing Commander Yeo-Thomas.
The old spy
was an immensely loyal individual and provided great help to Dietzsch, a man whom he viewed, whatever his faults, as his personal savior.
Yeo-Thomas and his wife
visited Dietzsch and his wife, Lilly, in Germany, found him jobs, and sent him gifts and hundreds of deutschmarks in financial help over the years. Dietzsch’s wife wrote to Yeo-Thomas that her husband frequently woke up screaming with nightmares. “The SS is torturing me again,” he told her. But the friendship with Yeo-Thomas was a rock of comfort. “Tommy,” wrote Dietzsch in a 1957 letter, “I must confess that I never met a man like you. You have always helped me at the right moment. For my part, this means a bond for lifetime.”
Many of the Buchenwald
inmates who had considered Dietzsch a brute reconsidered later. In the 1960s, he was invited to attend inmate reunions in West Germany—a prematurely aged man with a pot belly, a crew cut, a small dog, and a hearing aid. “
Of all my
saviors, it is to Dietzsch to whom I have been most unjust in my consideration,” the SOE agent Stéphane Hessel wrote in a 2007 memoir. His early assessment of Dietzsch, no doubt influenced by Balachowsky, was “deformed by the Manicheism of the camps. What would we have done without his courage and loyalty?”

On April 17, 1945
, at Buchenwald, Ludwik Fleck declared on an American military questionnaire that he intended to “emigrate to one of the overseas democratic countries,” and gave the address of a distant relative in New York and two other American references. But his destination plan was at some point crossed out and replaced with a handwritten word: “Moskau.” Perhaps Fleck did this to assure that he would be able to reconnect with Ryszard and Ernestyna in now-Soviet Lwów. More likely, a Soviet representative, jealously enforcing control of some sort, made the change. Fleck’s vision of life after the war was probably fluid.
Some acquaintances
—and correspondence in his secret police files—say he wanted to emigrate to Israel immediately. But despite his experiences, including postwar Polish anti-Semitism, Fleck never stopped “feeling” Polish. And he always pined for Lwów.

The new Soviet
rulers of Lwów estimated that half the city’s 300,000 prewar residents had died of murder, illness, or hunger. Poland, the Big Three had agreed at Yalta, was a republic on wheels whose borders would now roll west. Poland surrendered the lands east of the 1921 Curzon line to the Soviet Union—an area that included the cities of Lwów and Vilnius (in Soviet Lithuania)—and gained much of Silesia, including the former German cities of Breslau (now Wrocław) and Gleiwitz (Gliwice). At a huge rally at the Lwów Opera House on July 30, 1944, the Ukrainian Communist leader Khrushchev announced that Lwów was a Ukrainian city. He did not mention Jewish or Polish suffering there. About 800 Jews came out of the sewers and other hiding places, but they only spooked the people of Lwów, who offered little help. Meeting with Polish intellectuals on December 6, 1944, Communist officials said the city’s schools would hencefore teach in Ukrainian. Those who wanted their children to speak Polish should take them to Poland. By March 12, 1945, only 30,000 of the estimated 87,000 Poles who were present at war’s end had departed voluntarily. Having failed to persuade the rest to leave their homes, the Soviets began massive deportations. Eventually, 1.5–2 million Poles would move west from Ukraine, while 500,000 Ukrainians would move east. Banach, the mathematician, remained behind; he died of lung cancer in 1945.

Where the Lwowites
settled was often a matter of chance. If the train stopped long enough for a family to locate an empty apartment, they’d stay. The trail of deportees ended up distributed along the rail line that ran through southern Poland—in cities like Przemy
l, Gliwice, Kraków, and Katowice. Many went to Wrocław, although the city had been leveled in the final days of the war. The Poles had suffered, proportionately, more than any other nation during World War II, losing 6 million of their 30 million citizens, 3 million of them Jews. They received scant justice. Their Allies permitted Stalin to take half their territory, the hundreds of thousands of partisans who’d fought the Nazis were murdered, jailed, or forced to keep quiet. There was even less justice for the former residents of Lwów. As Polish citizens of a city that was no longer Polish, and which furthermore had been “reclaimed” for Ukraine after centuries of “occupation,” the Poles of Lwów were an inconvenient people. There could be no justice for the loss of life and property.
The Germans who
killed the Lwów professors, for example, were never prosecuted; Poland was not permitted to prosecute Nazi crimes that occurred east of the Soviet–Nazi demarcation line of September 1939.

“They did everything possible to erase Polish Lwów from history, to pretend that it didn’t exist,” says Wacław Szybalski. “That really hurt me. I loved my city.”

The way forward for Lwowites in socialist Poland was to renounce the past, but it was extremely painful.
The poet Adam Zagajewski
, born in Lwów in 1945, grew up hearing the Lwów dialect and recollections of his parents and their friends. He wrote,

There was too much

of Lvov, it brimmed the container,

it burst glasses, overflowed

each pond, lake, smoked through every