The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (9 page)

Religious Jews lived mostly in a poorer section of town lying to the north and east of the Opera House, but other, increasingly assimilated Jews lived in mixed districts around the city. A Jewish entrepreneur, Mejer Balaban, brought the Eastern Trade Fair to the hilly green spaces of Stryj Park in 1921. It opened with an alarming bang when a Ukrainian nationalist tried to assassinate Marshal Piłsudski (recognizing the sound of gunfire, the old warrior ducked—two of the bullets wounded Lwów’s provincial governor). Despite its inauspicious beginnings, the fair was a much-awaited September custom for the youth, who trawled for free tchochkes and food from Hungarian, Romanian, and Russian stalls, while businesses showed off their new tractors and radios and building materials. By 1928 there were 1,600 exhibitors and 150,000 visitors, and state-owned Radio Lwów began broadcasting from the fair two years later.
It became the most popular
station in the country, with news, educational programs, and comical sketches by Jewish and Polish comedians. Piłsudski, forever grateful to the city for its defense against the Red Army, would call in to offer his thoughts about the best Lwów sausage stands. The radio personalities Szczepko (a Pole, Kazimierz Wajda) and To
ko (a Jew, Henryk Vogelfänger), known for their racy Lwów slang, starred in movies such as
Włócz
gi
(Tramps), whose theme song “Tylko w Lwowie” (Only in Lwów) became a kind of city anthem. Hundreds of other popular Lwowian songs could be heard in the parks and plazas, which were saturated with music.

Habsburg culture had left its stamp on the city in its classical architecture, in the formal dress of the men in their three-piece suits and canes, in the deferential and differential cap doffings and touchings required of gentlemen greeting acquaintances of varied social status, and, above all, in café culture.
Every middle-class Lwowite
had a regular café. Some were expensive, some known for their exquisite pastries or regional wines, but all had newspapers bound to wooden sticks. The café was the sine qua non of academic life. “
Most of my colleagues
slept in their apartments, worked at the university and lived in cafés,” one professor wrote of the early 1930s. “Lwów’s charm was in its leisurely atmosphere, its superficial quick friendships, its witty and spiteful gossip from which no one was safe and which no one took too seriously. For years the same people met at the same time at the same place in the same cafés, knowing each other’s troubles and
affaires
, discussing those of their colleagues but never inviting one another home.” On a typical lunch date, the professor sits with a friend “discussing physics, Bolshevism, and the love affairs of our acquaintances, when my companion looks at his watch. ‘It is twelve-twenty already. I have a lecture at twelve. I shall come again after the lecture.’” Slowly he gets up to pay his bill. The waiter automatically adds the usual tip. “Then my colleague shakes hands vigorously with me, we bow deeply and ceremoniously to each other and slowly he goes to his lecture.”

Many scientists had moved to Lwów during the partition of Poland because Vienna was kinder to Polish culture and innovation than Moscow or Berlin. In the 1920s, Lwów developed a particularly strong reputation in fine art, philosophy, the sciences, and mathematics. Its mathematicians worked in the cafés on Akademicka.
Their favorite was at first
the Roma, at Akademicka 26, and later the Szkocka (Scottish Café), across the street, though a few preferred Załewski’s, across the tree-covered mall from the Roma, which everyone agreed had the best coffee and pastries.

The Lwów school
of mathematics was built initially around the work of logicians such as Jan Lukasiewicz, inventor of Polish notation, on which early computer memory designs such as Hewlett-Packard’s reverse Polish were based. In the 1920s, this recondite society included Stanisław Ulam, who later created the H-bomb with Edward Teller; the cone-headed, bottle-shaped Włodzimierz Sto
ek (“always in good humor and joking incessantly,” recalled a colleague, “he loved to consume Frankfurters liberally smeared with horseradish, a dish that he maintained cured melancholy”); the towering, very loud Bronisław Knaster, and Stanisław Mazur, a founder of game theory. Sometimes they were joined by Hugo Steinhaus, a polymath, polylinguist, and one of the only Jews in Poland who achieved a full professorship during the Polish republic without converting to Catholicism.
Steinhaus owed this distinction
to his international reputation, and to a family that included a brother in parliament and another who died fighting for Polish independence by Piłsudski’s side. That was about as Polish as a Jewish family could get.

One day in 1916, while strolling through a Kraków park, Steinhaus heard a young stranger and his friend discussing the “Lebesque integral,” a concept known only in the higher spheres of mathematics. Thus began the legend of Stefan Banach, blond, blue-eyed, tall, and heavyset, a self-taught street urchin and chain-smoker of uncertain paternity. Steinhaus took Banach under his wing and introduced him to influential academics, leading Lwów University to hire him in 1922. Banach shocked the Lwów bourgeoisie with his indifference to convention, his appreciation for beer and soccer matches, and his tendency to walk the streets at all hours in an undershirt. His circle met first at the Roma and then, when the latter stopped allowing him to pay on credit, at the Scottish Café.
Some of these discussions
, amid the smoke and clatter and laughter of the café, had an intensity, Ulam wrote,

that I have never seen surpassed, equaled or approximated anywhere, except perhaps at Los Alamos during the war years. I recall a session with Mazur and Banach at the Scottish Café which lasted 17 hours without interruption except for meals. There would be brief spurts of conversation, a few lines would be written on the table, occasional laughter would come from some of the participants, followed by long periods of silence during which we just drank coffee and stared vacantly at each other. The café clients at neighboring tables must have been puzzled by these strange doings.

It was out of such discussions that delirious formulas such as the Banach-Tarski paradox were born. Alfred Tarski was a Warsaw-based mathematician whose Jewish ancestry had cost him a professorship in Lwów that was instead given to the equally famous Leon Chwistek (this failure, indirectly, led to Tarski’s escape from Nazism to a safe haven at the University of Calfornia at Berkeley). The paradox, an arcane set geometry theorem, proved that a solid ball in three-dimensional space could be divided into a finite number of pieces that could be put back together in a way that yielded two identical copies of the original ball. In the Scottish Café, an orange could become two oranges.

Frequently, the equations written on the Scottish Café’s marble tabletops were erased by unwitting waiters. At his wife’s insistence, Banach in 1933 brought in a simple black-and-white composition book, which was kept behind the counter. When the table scribbling got intense, the mathematicians called for the notebook to be brought out, and wrote important theorems and problems in it. The Scottish Book, it was called. When the cafés closed, Banach wandered over to the train station, where he could spend the early morning hours over a drink at the all-night cafeteria. In his requirement of music and noise to lubricate mental gears, Banach embodied what was unnatural and noble about city life—the concatenation of clashing smells, languages, accents, flavors, the mixture of rudeness and formality that somehow inspired thoughts both original and humane in what was, after all, a small city. The mathematicians in their cafés, working at their apparently important yet impenetrable problems, added an ethereal element to the life of a city known for its hustlers and beggars, speculators and traders, vodka producers and oilmen (the first refinery in the world had been built near Lwów in 1856).

The Scottish Café (right) and the Roma (left). (Courtesy of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe.)

Café life brought together intellectuals from different milieus, offering an ideal setting for intellectual cross-fertilization. Everyone at the Roma knew Weigl—in fact, he regularly forgot his umbrellas and coats there on his way to and from the office. Sometimes the talk at the Scottish Café focused on science, or the mathematicians gossiped about peers, grumbled and shouted about Nazis or Bolsheviks. Professorial jobs were hard to come by in interwar Poland—especially, but not exclusively, for Jews. The tables at the Szkocka were full of professors, learned unemployables like the Jewish mathematician Juliusz Schauder, and café creatures of all types.
The Roma had a character
named Ostap Ortwin, a literary critic who was president of the Lwów Literary Club. Ortwin was tall and broad-shouldered, with thick eyebrows and a black Cossack-style mustache—not a typical look for a Jew. He was outspoken and loud, his opinions rattling the Roma’s windows, wrote his friend Józef Wittlin, and “the anti-Semitic idiots retreated in reverence” when he strode the streets.

Of course, daily existence
was not always as romantic as these café reminiscences suggest. Increasingly, anti-Semitism impinged on public and private life. Despite being an outré bastard, Banach possessed such absurd talent that he could make it in academia, but his Jewish colleagues had few chances. Schauder, who had equations named for him, was forced to work as a private tutor. There was a saying in Polish academia, “talent is passed on from father to son-in-law.” Jobs were few, marriage to another professor’s daughter was a common ramp to success, and Jewish scholars—with rare exceptions—had to teach high school.

Ludwik Fleck took a
number of steps to deal with these disadvantages. He worked from 1921 until 1923 in Weigl’s laboratory, where he developed a method of typhus diagnosis involving a weak suspension of typhus antigens injected under the skin, similar to the method doctors around the world still use to test for exposure to tuberculosis. Fleck called it the exanthin reaction. Yet after receiving his doctorate for this work, Fleck found he had no options in academia. There were a few Jewish scientists in Weigl’s laboratory—Karolina Reisowa, who had been a colleague of Weigl’s in Nusbaum-Hilarowicz’s lab, worked on amphibian development; Adam Finkel was a specialist in the blood problems of louse feeders—but both had won their positions under the Habsburgs. Professional advancement in the new Polish republic grew increasingly difficult in the years between 1920 and 1939. Weigl tried hard to help his erstwhile assistant.
His best friend was the
leading dermatologist in town, Jan Lenartowicz, who hired Fleck in 1923 as a bacteriologist in the Department of Skin and Venereal Diseases at Lwów’s General Hospital. In the footnotes of Fleck’s scientific papers from this period, one finds frequent expressions of thanks to Weigl for materials and guidance, an indication that the two scientists maintained a connection. In 1923, Fleck married Ernestyna Waldman, a scientific technician and the daughter of a wealthy Stryj merchant. With her dowry, he bought himself a private laboratory that he would use to enhance his earnings from the state jobs he held over the next 12 years. Perhaps Weigl attended the wedding, or at least sent a gift, but all evidence of this sort disappeared in the turbulent decades that followed. Indeed, practically the only memorabilia we have of Fleck’s interwar life are the papers he published in scientific journals, mostly in Polish and German.