The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (8 page)

The couple shared a comforting bourgeois routine that contrasted with the perilous life in the laboratory. The professor and
Pani
(Lady) Weigl walked each morning at nine from their apartment on Wagilewicza Street to the laboratory, a distance of less than a mile, and worked there through the morning. Zofia was the administrator of the laboratory, and also its paymaster. Everyone returned home for lunch, served punctually at two by the Ukrainian maid, with Zofia returning a bit early to help prepare the meal. Weigl would arrive, singing bawdy songs in Czech and German, head into the kitchen, and sniff the pots. At times, he would whisper to his son, “There’s nothing good today. Let’s go to the pub.” At lunch, Weigl would complain about his employees—“so and so is an idiot, I must fire him”—while Zofia diplomatically defended each one. Sometimes the professor napped before returning to the laboratory, where he often stayed deep into the night.

Sunday dinners were more formal. Depending on the season, there was trout cooked different ways, partridges in the autumn, or duck in cream sauce with Czech dumplings. Weigl himself prepared various dishes: crawfish soup, marinated trout, frog legs fried in bread crumbs. He was constantly trying new sauces, developed a finicky way of making tea involving serial filtration, and liked to eat bread smeared with honey mustard. On special occasions, the family dined at the Hotel George, a classy spot for the Lwów bourgeoisie.

Home life featured conversation and jokes and dancing with Zofia’s three sisters, all accomplished, intelligent women. Weigl teased his wife about her gilded ancestry, which included a great-grandmother who was an Italian countess. “I keep looking for aristocratic tendencies in you,” Weigl would tell his son in a deadpan way. “But so far all I detect is a certain laziness.” Some evenings the family watched home movies, powered by a hand crank—birds and animals and comical stick-figure cartoons that Weigl created. At Wiktor’s insistence, they took in a Tom Mix film, but Weigl scoffed at the hero’s gunfighting skills. “An 1840 Colt revolver didn’t have a threaded barrel,” he said. “You couldn’t shoot accurately with it from more than 20 meters.” Weigl was not a great fan of music, but he appreciated a risqué show. Once he traveled to Warsaw to see Josephine Baker perform. He came back disappointed that her outfits were not as skimpy as advertised in Paris, where she wore only ostrich feathers on her head and a gold cord around the hips.

Weigl had many affairs
, according to his contemporaries. Eventually, they had significant consequences for Weigl and his family. At home and in the lab, he was absorbed in his own interests, and encouraged his family and lab assistants to find things that fascinated them and that they could do without bothering him too much. But he was an affectionate presence, free of prejudice, brilliant, not pompous though certainly arrogant.

Weigl, wife, and son in the mountains. (Courtesy of National Museum, Przemy
l. Photograph of original by S. Kosiedowski.)

The family spent
holidays at a wooden house in the Carpathian village of Ilemnia, 80 miles south of Lwów. A trout stream ran through the property, and the opportunities for hiking, hunting, mushroom collecting, and fishing were endless. Weigl found newts and salamanders that he brought back to the lab—embryology had been the subject of his dissertation. He designed fishing rods and created a trout fly that was carried for years in the English Hardy catalog as “Weigl’s glory.” Said his son, “It was characteristic of father to do everything perfectly, whether it was his profession, fishing, or dancing. When something didn’t interest him, he wouldn’t do it.” This included finances and administration, which he left to his wife. He hated parlor games and sunbathing, but in 1936 he organized the “Ilemnia Olympics” for Wiktor and his friends. He obtained javelins and disks and, naturally, threw them better than the boys did. Weigl became so fond of Ilemnia that in the mid-1930s he built a laboratory extension on the house. Soon it doubled as a research station for investigations of typhus among the Hutsuls, the mountain people of the area.

In Lwów, the renown of the Weigl laboratory grew steadily at the university through the 1920s and 1930s. Weigl’s corner office in the back of the building had a large window that looked out on sycamore, oak, and walnut trees in the university’s carefully maintained Botanical Garden, which ran uphill for two city blocks, ending in a row of greenhouses. Leaving the building by the front door and turning to the left, Weigl would pass St. Nicholas Church on his way down the cobblestoned hill to Akademicka Street, the lower end of the Lwów
corso
that ran for a mile and ended at the baroque Opera House. If the weather was fine, he’d often be dressed like a gentleman explorer, in a pith helmet and a wide-collared shirt known as a
słowacka
. On his way home, he would gaily greet students, and often stop at the Café Roma, at the corner of Akademicka below his lab.

Lwów was a city of rolling
hills and twisting, undulating streets, with the ruins of the High Castle—built by the city’s founding king in 1269 and wrecked repeatedly in the centuries since—towering above everything. The variety of pleasing perspectives, the stock of Habsburg and Italianate buildings, the sheer good bones of the place, have struck visitors even in the city’s darkest times. The city had for centuries been a multiethnic crossroads linking the Polish heartland with Russia and the east. Its heterogeneity was symbolized by the cathedral spires of multiple faiths that scraped its skyline—Polish Catholic, Armenian, Ukrainian Uniate, and Eastern Rite, as well as numerous synagogues. In the recollection of those who studied and worked in interwar Lwów, that diversity was a source of both strife and cultural richness. In 1930, Lwów had about 300,000 residents, more than half Polish, a third Jewish. The working class had its own jargon, Bałak, incorporating elements of Yiddish, Ukrainian, and other languages. Fewer than a fifth of the city’s residents were Ukrainians, but the countryside was Ukrainian, with some Jewish towns as well, and a few Germans whom the kaiser had enticed to settle in the 18th century.

The Habsburgs had taken control of the region they called Galicia in the partition of Poland in 1772. To a far greater degree than the czar or the Prussians, Austria ruled its subjects with a conniving but relatively soft touch. Lwowites had a great deal of autonomy and self-confidence by the end of the 19th century; many Jews would gratefully remember the reigning Habsburg attitude as lenient bigotry. The crown may not have loved the Jews, but it tolerated them as just another patch in its multiethnic quilt. World war brought Russian occupation, looting, and reoccupation by the Austro-Hungarians, followed in November 1918 by a three-week struggle for the city between Polish and Ukrainian nationalists. When the Poles had seized control of the city for good, their militia fell upon the Jewish quarter, setting off one of the worst pogroms in the city’s history.

After independence, one
author wrote, the Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews “politically worked against each other, lived daily near one another, and culturally exchanged productively with one another.” One might also have said the Poles resented the Jews, the Ukrainians resented the Poles and the Jews, and the Jews, including those who identified with the Polish nation, were optimistic or fearful but generally expected the worst. The interwar era was dominated by the figure of Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the leader of Polish independence and chief of state until 1922, when he stepped down. Piłsudski returned in a 1926 coup d’état and remained Poland’s de facto dictator until his death in 1935. Many Jews viewed him as an ersatz, philo-Semitic kaiser who protected them from the worst excesses of Polish nationalism.

Overall, the city was relatively unscathed by the Great War and recovered quickly. The area south of Lwów had one of the world’s largest working oil fields, and the rising global consumption of the product put money in many a pocket. New buildings and residential neighborhoods grew steadily until the very start of World War II. For the Polish and Jewish middle class, there were plenty of ominous signs, but city life sparkled with promise. “
We were like ants
bustling in an anthill over which the heel of a boot is raised,” wrote the science fiction fabulist Stanisław Lem, a contemporary of Wiktor Weigl’s who recorded the Lwów of his childhood in the memoir
Highcastle
. “Some saw its shadows, or thought they did, but everyone, the uneasy included, ran about their usual business until the very last minute.” Poland was a new country, Lwów a growing city, and for Polish youth especially it was a heady time to be alive. “
We were proud of our city
, and we wanted to make it the best in Poland,” said Wacław Szybalski, who like Lem was born in 1921. Szybalski, a brilliant scientist from a noble family, moved to the United States in the 1950s and was a founding member of the postwar genetics community along with his friend James Watson, codiscoverer of the helical form of DNA, and others.

Lwów had a way of assimilating people from outside, whether Armenian and Italian merchants in the 17th century or Jews from Galician villages in the 19th and early 20th. In this it was more like an American city than Kraków or other tradition-bound Polish places. During Poland’s partition, academics and cultural figures suppressed by the Prussian and czarist regimes had reinvented themselves in the more easygoing, café-going society of Lwów. Weigl himself, notes Szybalski, was “born 100 percent Austrian and came from a family that knew nothing about Poland. It’s characteristic that he became a die-hard Lwówite.”
Nostalgia for Lwów
is quite palpable in those who left. Lem, who grew up in a mixed Polish-Jewish neighborhood near the Opera House, remembered riding to Stryj Park in a two-horse droshky, watching new Disney cartoons and movies at the Marysienka Theater on Jagiellonska Street, and above all Załewski’s Confectionary, where “great artists, Leonardos of confection, realized their vocation. . . . I remember pink pigs with chocolate eyes and every variety of fruit, mushroom, meat, plants; and there were fields, too, as if Załewski could reproduce the whole cosmos in sugar and chocolate, using shelled almonds for the sun and icing for the stars . . . Vesuviuses of whipped cream whose volcanic bombs were heavily candied fruit.” There was also Pias
cki, which sold the Mideast delicacy halva, and the Yugoslavia, which offered Turkish delight, baklava, and other Balkan treats, as well as kvass, a mild Ukrainian beer brewed from bread.

Akademicka Street was full of elegant stores and cafés, with rows of poplars lining a central promenade. It ended at the Hotel George, an 18th-century pink wedding cake of a building, and beyond the George stood the towering Adam Mickiewicz Column, which honored Poland’s great poet-patriot and was a natural meeting place for political rallies. To the north lay curving Legionów, the main shopping street and gathering spot in town. At night, electric signs for soap, chocolates, and electric lights blinked in the darkness on the five-story buildings along the street, where jugglers, fire-eaters, singers and musicians, organ grinders, talking parrots, and traveling family circuses entertained the crowds. At the Marysie
ka, near the Opera House,
King Kong, The Mummy
, and
The Werewolf
showed in the early 1930s.
The city boasted 21
movie theaters in 1936.