by Arthur Allen
During the war, von Neumann and Stan Ulam would help design the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. While his friends harnessed the curve of binding energy in the New Mexico desert, Banach smoked and strapped lice boxes to his legs in Lwów.
Throughout the war, his cough grew worse; he lost weight and often looked pale. “To help him, I cheated a little with the number of lice in his cage whenever he seemed tired,” Szybalski recalled. “I did not want him to lose too much blood. I considered it legitimate for the good of Polish mathematics.” In 1944, Banach was arrested for currency violations—he made deals on the black market to manage a chronic shortness of cash. Weigl called on Hermann Eyer to fish him out of prison after a few days. Eyer also rescued lab workers from Gestapo prisons and even concentration camps.
Szybalski’s father, Stefan, who had begun the war as a prosperous aristocrat and businessman, kept falling lower on the social scale. During the Soviet occupation, he’d been a translator and driver. Now he had to become a louse feeder. Wacław’s brother, Stanisław, had a slightly higher status: he was a louse dissector. Their mother continued to be the center of the family. Every afternoon at two, they met for the important meal. Occasionally there was nothing but soup and bread, but usually the women managed to scrounge meat and vegetables, and dessert. Wacław wired the apartment’s electrical meter to run backwards and installed a suction pump to increase the gas pressure. He brewed bathtub vodka to make a few extra dollars. Family and patriotism kept them strong. There was a little poem that circulated in Lwów about the Volksdeutsche, Poles who had exchanged their birthright for better diets and Nazi protection.
What is your motto, little Volksdeutscher? White bread!
What made you? The war.
How will you die? Hanged from a dry branch.
What will your grave monument be? A pile of shit.
In 1943, the Germans partially reopened the Lwów Polytechnical University. The German war effort required more Polish technicians in industry, even if they were Untermenschen. Now Szybalski spent half the day at school. “They didn’t know what to do,” he said. “On the one hand, they felt they had to kill everyone. But if they killed us all it would interfere with the war effort.” When it came to the Jews, however, elimination came first, exploitation next. At the Weigl institute, everyone knew about the slave camp at Janowska, about Belzec, and about the mass shootings that regularly occurred on the outskirts of town. But the Jews were walled off in the ghetto, and so was the scale of their suffering. Jews, the Germans made perfectly clear, were not to be employed at the institute. Szybalski had a crush on a Jewish girl from his chemistry class, named Roza, and offered to hide her in the family’s apartment during the winter of 1942. The penalty for protecting a Jew was death. Roza would not leave her own family behind, however. Szybalski never heard from her again.
The Nazis were proving wretchedly incompetent at preventing typhus from spreading out of the ghetto. This problem grew from the contradictory impulses of the SS state. It was policy to eradicate the Jews, but the war required every drop of labor extracted from the Reich’s enemies before they died. Public hygiene experts urged the confining of Jews to the ghetto. But the military and other authorities needed the Jews to show up for work. So they trudged through town to factories and other public places, seeding them with infected lice in the process. Each Jew in Lwów had an ID book, and the authorities devised a continually shifting set of stamps that identified workers as crucial to the economy—A for Arbeiter (worker), R for Rüstung (defense). Without a stamp, one faced death as a “useless eater.” The sick dragged themselves out of bed to work.
Wherever Jews went, the murderers hounded them. Early in 1942, the Lwów health chief Dopheide ordered all typhus patients brought to the hospital on Kuszewicz Street. After the hospital had filled with about 500 patients, heavy trucks pulled up outside it. Gestapo and black-clad Ukrainian militiamen raided the building, defenestrated some of the patients, hauled out the rest, and flung them into the trucks. In broad daylight and in plain view of the city’s residents, the trucks drove to a sandy hill on the edge of town, where the patients were machine-gunned and buried in pits. “The brutality of these actions is difficult to describe,” Fleck recalled immediately after the war. “Hunting human beings with dogs was part of it. Dragging seriously ill patients out of their homes or hospitals, where they often lay after operations with open wounds or broken limbs, was another. Wrenching out the arms and legs of small children, who were tossed like bundles up on to the transport wagons.”
In the hospital, where Fleck and his colleagues attempted to tend to the sick, the Gestapo swept through with such “cleansings” every few weeks. When relatives got wind that an Aktion was in the offing, they would come to the hospital to evacuate their loved one. Eventually, the wholesale murder of their patients discouraged doctors from bringing them to hospitals for treatment. The ghetto itself became a secret hospital, with patients hidden in attics and cellars, under blankets and pillows, behind dressers and false walls. Dr. Marek Redner recalled being called to a quiet, immaculate apartment where he was told, after the family decided it could trust him, that four typhus-infected members were concealed in the beds. Sometimes “the typhus patients were hidden in places I could only reach crawling into narrow places, literally on my stomach. Two or three times daily I had to provide care in the most incredible positions, sometimes climbing a ladder or standing on stacked furniture.” One day, while administering a cardiac stimulant to a sick man, Redner heard a commotion behind him and saw a huge wall mirror being pushed aside. From behind it appeared the corpse of a beautiful young woman being dragged out by the legs, long black hair sweeping the floor behind her.
Patients with psychotic reactions to typhus posed a particularly frightening challenge to their families and doctors. Their screams and unpredictable actions could attract the attention of the Gestapo or neighborhood spies. Other patients showed extraordinary stamina. “Frequently it was necessary to visit a patient hiding in an attic where the winter temperature was 20 below zero,” said Redner. “Strangely, these patients were recovering well even though they lacked suitable bedding or blankets. I concluded that the low temperature had a beneficial effect, lowering the fever like a permanent compress and stimulating the circulation.” That was true only for the young, who even in normal circumstances are more likely to survive typhus. Most of the patients over the age of 50 died.
Samuel Drix, a medical student when the war broke out, contracted typhus at the Janowska camp and had a fever of 108 degrees, temporary deafness, and an inability to read—alexia. “I could not read a letter smuggled from my parents—I saw characters but could not understand their meaning. And then came apraxia—I wanted to write a letter to my parents, but I could not write. . . . I also lost appetite, which—with our starvation diet—was simply unheard of.” After recovering, Drix treated hundreds of typhus patients and developed an ability to diagnose the disease with a quick glance. He, too, observed an unheard-of resistance in many patients. “Inmates went through this terrible sickness, walking around with a constant fever of more than 40 degrees Celsius [104 Fahrenheit] lasting for more than two weeks. . . . I really cannot explain it, but it seems that the human mind and body have unexpected inner strength that comes out at such times of struggle for existence.”
Most of the survivors would die anyway, murdered in the streets or the camps. In his memoir, Ludwik Hirszfeld asked whether his and his colleagues’ achievements had been worth it. All the patients and the doctors he’d known in the ghetto were dead. “What does it matter now how the murdered ones intended to combat tuberculosis or venereal diseases? Yet perhaps there will be a few who will be touched by knowing how those condemned to death tried to live in dignity and to reassemble the norms of life.”
After the war, Fleck and Hirszfeld shared their experiences in medical hope and futility. During the war, they fought typhus separately in the ghettos of Lwów and Warsaw. Both struggled with the meager tool
s at hand to manage the catastrophe that engulfed their community. As typhus spread freely through the Lwów ghetto, Fleck made a bold, desperate attempt to turn his knowledge into a practical prophylactic. It is surely one of the most remarkable episodes of medical innovation accomplished under the crushing oppression of Nazism.
Studying the urine of patients who responded to the exanthin reaction, Fleck determined that during a period of several days around the appearance of the first symptoms of typhus, the patient’s urine contained typhus antigens that were recognizable to the immune system. Similar findings had been described in certain pneumonia patients. Fleck hoped these particles might be useful, and in early 1942 he began research on the urine of typhus patients in the ghetto hospital in Lwów. Initially, he hoped to devise a diagnostic method that gave results more quickly than the Weil-Felix reaction. Eventually, he hoped to make a vaccine. Within a few months, his success at creating an early diagnostic was clear enough for Fleck to bring the results to the attention of other hospital doctors, to Hirszfeld in Warsaw, and to Professor Groër, who had returned to the Mother and Child Hospital. The ghetto newspaper published an announcement of his work on May 23, 1942.
Fleck and his colleagues needed to find a way to concentrate the antigen if they hoped to make a vaccine from the urine. They did this by putting urine samples in a vacuum at 40 degrees Celsius, concentrating them ten times, then filtering the concentrate. “In a normal lab this is an easy technique, in an improvised ghetto lab it was in no way easy,” Fleck wrote later. They found an oil pump to run the filter, but the apparatus had to be improvised by making a water-driven mill wheel fashioned with a jigsaw. While Fleck worked on the vaccine, the Germans raided the hospital and the apartments and streets around it. Patients were carried off and liquidated. Co-workers disappeared, sometimes for days, sometimes for good. “The work suffered as a result,” Fleck wrote. “But the results were good.”
To get more precise information on when, in the course of an illness, the patient began to excrete antigen in urine, Fleck and his team began gathering liters of the liquid from patients and their family contacts. They were able to find antigen in patients who were not yet ill, especially in the first two days of incubation of the sickness, sometimes even four days before the appearance of fever. At this point, they began testing to see whether it was possible to protect guinea pigs against infection by injecting them with the antigen. Guinea pigs evince a subtle but defined reaction when infected with typhus; they show no obvious symptoms except an increase in body temperature. Here again, Fleck succeeded. “Guinea pigs immunized with urine preparations did not react to the injections of blood from the sick, while the unimmunized controls showed the typical fever curve,” he wrote.
Now Fleck felt he had a basis to make a vaccine. The difficulties were immense. He and his co-workers were collecting up to 100 liters of urine every day in the hospital, but the hospital lacked equipment to process it. One of Fleck’s colleagues, Dr. Bernard Umschweif, had worked before the war in the Laokoon chemical factory, which was owned by a Jewish businessman. The factory had been confiscated and was now in the hands of a German, a Dr. Schwanenberg. Fleck decided to take a calculated risk by making contact with the German. He and Umschweif walked to Laokoon, about a mile away, and offered Schwanenberg a patent for production of the vaccine if he would allow them to produce it in his factory. Schwanenberg agreed, and also said he would seek permission from the Gestapo to hire them as Jewish employees.
News of Fleck’s vaccine spread quickly through the medical community of Lwów. A non-Jewish colleague who dared to visit the Jewish hospital on Kuszewicz Street in 1942 was astonished at the discipline and seriousness of the Jewish doctors. “I talked to Fleck and other friends there, and I found that they were still full of medical ambitions, and trying not to anticipate their fate,” said the physician. “They worked very efficiently in less than modest circumstances, and they even had scientific aspirations. Fleck’s discovery, which allowed the early diagnosis of typhus, was a very valuable one, theoretically and clinically, and it soon became known throughout town. It gave rise to a joke: instead of the German term Fleckfieber, the disease should now be called ‘Fleck’s typhus.’”
At the Weigl institute, vestiges of normality blended into moments of horror. People sold homemade vodka and soap, cakes and bean soup, in the locker room. Once a new lady came in to work with them but seemed very nervous and left after a few days. They heard later that she was a Jew, and had hanged herself from her radiator.
For the young Poles, life could be tolerable and occasionally pleasant. Feeders of healthy lice got 100 zlotys per month, about enough to buy 10 pounds of butter or 20 pounds of sugar on the black market. In addition to wages, they obtained artificial butter, ersatz honey, and sugar beet marmalade, with the occasional piece of sausage. The wages were not much, but the Nazis were not hounding them through the streets. And the institute was a source of fascination.
Decades later, men and women would describe the empty rooms and crumbling walls of its mysterious basement. One room, which according to legend was haunted by the spirit of “the bishop” (the building had, after all, once been a convent) resembled a “torture chamber” with hooks, chains, and brackets mysteriously embedded in the walls. The window of Weigl’s corner, underground office looked out on the Botanical Garden. The adjoining rooms had been converted into an animal house full of squeaking mice and snuffling guinea pigs that sang for their breakfast in the morning. The groundskeeper was a one-eyed, one-legged World War I veteran named Bakowski. He was notorious among the employees’ children for chasing them out of the garden. He was intensely loyal to Weigl. When the weather was good, the dissectors and feeders headed to the garden during breaks. Sometimes they played soccer. Romances began; people gossiped about them. On the weekend, there were occasionally outings to the country. Wacław Szybalski’s brother, Stan, recalled that two friendly German guards accompanied them on one lakeside excursion, to make sure they encountered no problems with Ukrainian militia.
“We were one big family,” the novelist Mirosław uławski wrote. “Although we were paid a pittance, and the additional allocations weren’t enough to replace the blood we lost, to be a Weigl employee was a mark of nobility.” It was good manners to make sure the louse boxes were sealed firmly. If they were loose, people in the tram would begin to move away as a louse peacefully wandered around a collar or sleeve. A year after the war ended, when asked, “What did you do?,” uławski would raise a leg and show faded red patches on his calves. Everyone from Lwów would understand.
Disease was a permanent hazard at the institute, but one with unexpected benefits at times. The employees spoke of three common occupational illnesses. Weiglowka referred to the malaise suffered post vaccination. Quintana was caused by a second form of Rickettsia, R. quintana, and was a nonfatal disease known in the West as trench fever. The institute workers, though vaccinated, often got sick with typhus. But the doctors preferred to call it zakładowka, “institute disease,” perhaps to draw attention away from the vaccine’s imperfections. Some cases were serious, but no one died. Alfred Jahn, a good-looking geography graduate student with working-class Lwów roots, was part of Szybalski’s lice-feeding group for a while, but after suffering terrible louse rashes became a dissector. Soon, however, he came down with a 104-degree fever. Dr. Mosing visited him and stated calmly, “It’s not typhus. It’s zakladowka.” Jahn now qualified to feed infected lice. Millions of typhus bacteria could enter his body without threat of harm (people only rarely got typhus twice), and he received double wages and more food. Jahn decided to see how many insects he could raise in a month. His record was 32,000. “Nobody knew if that was bad for our health, if there were long-term effects to being exposed to so much venom month after month,” Jahn wrote in a memoir. “We were experimental rabbits, but we didn’t care.”
For others, illness meant the end of a job. uławski awoke with a fever one night and thought he’d eaten too
many onion and potato fritters. Soon it got worse. Dr. Mosing came, took blood and urine samples, and diagnosed acute glomerulonephritis, caused by a reaction to lice proteins. No more feeding sessions for uławski. “All good things must come to an end,” he wrote. Stan Szybalski contracted an infection caused by Rickettsia quintana. He had a high fever and the shakes, a splitting headache, and terrible vomiting, and his sense of balance was permanently weakened. Exactly 50 years later, living in Florida, Szybalski had another attack of quintana. Luckily, his doctor was a German immigrant familiar with the disease.
Weigl’s senior staff probably worried more about sick lice than about sick people. Some feeders were particularly dangerous to the lice—a severely undernourished man developed terrible oozing blisters and memory problems, and the lice he was feeding died, which led to fears of a zoonotic epidemic in the louse population. Eventually the man recovered, and the louse deaths were isolated. Precautions had to be taken to keep cages from being overfilled, because this hindered ventilation and made the insects wet, leading to staph infections that could be fatal to the lice. The quality of the vaccine was lower during the summer when the feeders sweated and the lice tended to get sick. Terrible epidemics of a bacterium called Rickettsia rochalima, which spread from louse to louse through feces without human intermediaries, could ruin the colony and did so in 1939 and again in 1941. The pathogen did not affect humans, but R. prowazekii would not grow in lice infected with R. rochalima. The only way to stop the outbreaks was to destroy the infected colony, followed by thorough disinfection of the laboratory, and rebuilding from a stock of clean lice held in reserve. Weigl was less worried by quintana: it was easier to isolate and didn’t require destruction of the colony, since quintana-infected lice could simultaneously be infected with R. prowazekii without lowering the quality of the vaccine. As for the feeders infected with quintana—well, they would survive.
