The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (6 page)

Consider that before 1930 or so, most scientists believed that bacteria could not live inside cells.
To prove that a particular
organism caused a disease, the eminent German bacteriologist Robert Koch had stated in 1890, it was necessary to extract it from a sick person, grow it in an artificial medium, and reproduce the disease by injecting it into an experimental animal. Furthermore, by extracting the organism in question from animal blood, one could make a protective vaccine with it through chemical deactivation. Alternatively, broths containing the organism could be injected into a horse, which would produce antibodies that could be harvested and used as a passive immune serum—that is, a serum containing antibodies specific to the disease.

Cultures of the bacteria causing anthrax, typhoid fever, diphtheria, or tetanus met the postulates neatly, or at least seemed to. But no one could figure out how to grow typhus germs in an artificial medium like the bull’s blood used for diphtheria and tetanus. Nor could the disease easily be transferred from animal to animal. An ape could get louse-borne typhus, with great experimental difficulties, but the germ at most gave guinea pigs a bit of fever. Typhus-infected blood from the adorable little rodents could not be cultured in a broth.

The 1914 Serbian typhus epidemic burned itself out after a year, but events in Russia soon created a new opportunity for the disease. The world has never seen the equal of the great typhus epidemic that christened the Russian revolution. Circumstances under which it might be repeated are almost too dreadful to imagine. In late 1917, the Bolsheviks declared an armistice with Germany, and Lenin pulled Russia’s armies back from the front. They returned home hungry, ragged, and full of typhus. The disease was seeded in the civilian population just as the country plunged into a civil war that drew in Russia’s neighbors and enemies. Historical records of the epidemic are sketchy. The Bolshevik regime lacked the resources to track it, and had little interest in revealing the precarious state of its public health to a hostile world. Doctors who treated the disease often died. There were Western witnesses, but back home few believed their stories. Even fewer cared.

The early years of the Russian
revolution, a calvary of war, murder, epidemics, and incompetence, were so catastrophic that observers compared the country to Europe in the Middle Ages. The civil war, lasting roughly from 1917 to 1921, was a chaotic clash of armies whose troops often changed sides—the Bolshevik Reds, for example, fought anti-Bolshevik Whites, Ukrainian nationalists, and Poles led by Józef Piłsudski. White armies under various generals fought Communists, Poles, Ukrainians, and ragtag forces of the anarchist Nestor Makhno. Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, was occupied 15 times in three years. Ravaging, unwashed armies and columns of starving, diseased refugees and camp followers spread typhus across the land. Poor military leadership exacerbated the disorder. “
A minor setback
would precipitate a retreat that snowballed,” one historian has written, “as technical breakdown, the devastated terrain, the weather, the local population, disease, desertion and fear of political reprisals all conspired to destroy the fabric of the retreating force.”

“
I do not suppose
that there was a single house or flat in the whole of the south of Russia, from Novorossiysk to Moscow, but had had its case of typhus,” wrote a British physician. The implication of this statement, of course, is that all of Russia was lousy. And that was the case, as the writer explained:

Very well, says the reader, it is easy enough to guard against lice; you only need to wash often, take plenty of baths, change your clothes frequently, and avoid dirty places. But all these simple precautions were impossible. There was no fuel to thaw water or heat it for a bath, or to wash clothes in; water-pipes had frozen and burst; few people possessed spare shirts or underclothes, and, as for avoiding crowds, you could not move a step without running the risk of infection.

The worst of the epidemic began in the midst of the Polish-Soviet war of 1919–20. Lenin, Trotsky, and the other leading Communists had turned their attention west with the belief that after crushing the new, bourgeois Polish state, the Red Army could continue on to Germany and beyond, inspiring revolutions across Europe.
The Polish leader Piłsudski
, who trusted neither the Bolsheviks nor the White armies, in mid-1919 made a secret deal with Lenin that allowed the latter to send several divisions to fight the White forces of General Anton Denikin as they approached Moscow from the south. Denikin’s army was driven off toward the Black Sea while General Alexander
Kolchak
, the other major White leader, was routed and fled east over the Urals on the trans-Siberian railway amid a phantasmagoria of terror that covered a vast territory in murder, cannibalism, sickness, and debauchery. The vector of trains aided immensely in the spread of lice and typhus. Every town along the railway was overrun with hungry, freezing people who jammed rail carriages and houses to escape and stay warm. Corpses were packed into warehouses or strewn along roads and railways where they were stripped of all valuables. Every soldier’s greatcoat housed visible clusters of the lice, and the insects, dead and living, lay thick as sawdust on the crowded waiting room floors of the stations.

“
The sights which
I saw . . . and the statistics which I collected were so staggering that, when I afterwards told about them in Europe, my hearers simply shrugged their shoulders and refused to believe me,” a British intelligence officer wrote of the White Army’s flight. Trains were packed full of dead, dying, and sick typhus patients, often without a soul taking care of them. These so-called death trains were not permitted to stop in stations, and corpses were tossed out the window of moving trains “with as little ceremony as the stoker threw out ashes.” Nurses and orderlies robbed the sick and dead. On February 3, 1920, some 20,000 corpses lay unburied in the snow outside the city of Novonikolaevsk.

Not only the Whites suffered.
“Comrades,” Lenin told
the Congress of People’s Commissars on December 5, 1919, “it is impossible to imagine the dreadful situation in the typhus regions, where the population is broken, weakened, without material resources, where all public life ceases. To this we say, ‘Comrades, we must concentrate everything on this problem. Either the lice will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the lice!’”
A German Red Cross
relief team sent in 1921 gathered unforgettable visions; its members were astonished at the impassivity of the Russians. In the Kazan area, they saw people eating tree bark, acorns and prairie grass, corn stalks, barn sweepings, clay and horse manure. They saw huts full of people, mostly women and children, lying listlessly in unheated rooms awaiting death or muttering and screaming in typhus deliria, towns where a third of the villagers lay on the ground, dead or unconscious, with dogs gnawing at corpses. They collected at least 200 stories of cannibalism and saw graves that “must be guarded because the starving dig the dead up to eat them.” Disease spread through Moscow through scavengers returning after scouring the countryside for coal and flour. The winter was very cold, and no one could wash even if he or she wanted to.
Mutual delousing
was “the favorite indoor and outdoor sport,” said an American aid worker.

Conditions were particularly awful
among communities of poor Jews. The young American doctor Harry Plotz, who had witnessed epidemic typhus in Serbia in 1915, came to Ukraine in June 1920 on behalf of a Jewish relief organization. At a refugee camp in Kiev, typhus patients lay in the mud, crying for bread. Among the 2,000 refugees were pogrom victims limping about with open saber wounds. “Serbia, during its severe typhus epidemic,” wrote Plotz, “never had a sight like this.” The director of the Jewish hospital informed Plotz that of 110,000 Jews in the city, 25,000 had died of typhus over a period of six weeks. “The infected lice are transmitted from person to person and so the disease is rapidly propagated. The morale of the people is low, the desire to keep clean is lost,” Plotz wrote to the Joint Distribution Committee in New York. At the same time, he said, “Jewish communities are loath to follow orders in regard to bathing and delousing . . . for, under the guise of health propaganda, anti-Semitic literature is distributed, and, in the zeal for cleanliness, beards are violently shaved and pogroms occur.”

Typhus would have a transformative
effect on Russia. For reasons that may have to do with the immature immune systems of the young, typhus—like viral diseases such as measles and mumps—strikes more severely in older patients; in Russia, it killed more than half of those over 50 whom it sickened, but was only about 1 percent fatal among children. The rural poor, who were more likely to have been exposed as children to typhus, were also less likely to sicken or die. Thus, typhus killed off the aristocratic old guard and the intelligentsia, while sparing, to a greater degree, the peasantry.

This demographic impact
of the disease helps explain why Western powers viewed events in Russia less with tender mercy than with fear. Winston Churchill, who had declared that Germany sent Lenin to St. Petersburg in 1917 “the way you might send a vial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city,” depicted Russia as a land of “armed hordes smiting not only with bayonet and with cannon, but accompanied and preceded by swarms of typhus-bearing vermin which slay the bodies of men, and political doctrines which destroy the health and even the soul of nations.” The West focused its support on Poland, attempting to create a cordon sanitaire of guards and delousing stations to keep infected Russians from traveling west. Travelers would be interned, shaved, deloused, and bathed, their clothes exposed to louse-killing chemicals and hot water. Years before communism established the Iron Curtain, the Western powers constructed a curtain of steam. The hospital laboratory at Przemy
l became part of the weave.

This takes us back to Weigl and Fleck, whose laboratory was quietly advancing on the problem in these terrible epidemic years. Weigl had been working under Filip Eisenberg for three years in the fortress laboratory in Przemy
l when Eisenberg, in late 1917, won a prized professorship at Kraków’s Jagiellonian University, Poland’s oldest institution of higher learning. On his way out, Eisenberg recommended that Weigl take over leadership of the Przemy
l lab.
His method of inoculating
lice had drawn the attention of the authorities. In 1917, Emperor Franz Josef, while touring Przemy
l’s defenses, was introduced to the young typhus tamer. Weigl gave the monarch a tour of his laboratory, explaining in detail his method of infecting the lice. “That is quite interesting,” the emperor kept saying. “Truly it is!” Weigl’s aides would chuckle about the visit for years. It was clear that the old emperor had not understood a thing.