by Arthur Allen
The United States was also interested in kok-saghyz. In exchange for U.S. jeeps, aircraft, food, and other support, the Soviets sent the U.S. Agriculture Department seeds from the plant, portraying it as having revolutionary potential for wartime rubber production. About 200 American and Canadian scientists worked on the kok-saghyz project, trying different soils and fertilizers to improve the latex yield. About two years and millions of dollars later, having shown the Soviet hype to be overblown, they gave up. Himmler and Caesar, however, persevered. At its height, the Auschwitz-Rajsko dandelion battalion had 150 inmates, but it never produced enough rubber to put tires on a single car. “The soil in Auschwitz is, after all, terrible, nothing but clay,” one prisoner noted.
At Monowitz, another Auschwitz subcamp, the Italian chemist Primo Levi and thousands of other inmates slaved for more than a year to erect an enormous artificial rubber plant for IG Farben. Like Rajsko, Monowitz produced nothing tangible. But while the human toll at Monowitz was ghastly, Rajsko was one of the most pleasant workplaces in the camp system. The word Rajsko, as it happens, means “heavenly” in Polish. Compared with the main camp, it was heaven. Food rations were technically the same in both places, but the German SS woman in charge of the food at Rajsko, while anti-Semitic and rude, insisted on strict adherence to the distribution rules. In most of the camp, SS stole the rations or gave them to favored prisoners. Rajsko prisoners could supplement their rations with vegetables stolen from the gardens and the flesh of guinea pigs and rabbits from the experimental station. There were no selections for the gas chambers at Rajsko, and the morning roll call was only five or ten minutes long—in the main camp, it could go on for hours. Many of the inmates at Rajsko worked in warmed greenhouses. They ate at tables, slept in their own beds, and could take showers—an unheard-of luxury in a concentration camp. The only showers they had experienced at Auschwitz were part of the terrifying delousing process, or the false showers where their friends, mothers, and brothers had been suffocated with Zyklon gas.
The women in the Rajsko kok-saghyz commando lived at first in the women’s camp at Birkenau, which was frequently plagued by typhus. In October 1942, Caesar and his wife fell ill with the disease, and she died. When the widowed commander returned from his convalescence, he decided that, to keep Rajsko free of lice and typhus, his women would have to live in a dormitory at the outcamp. The inmates were thrilled. Now they had their own beds and could bathe when they wanted. Soon all the women at Birkenau dreamed of coming to Rajsko. At Birkenau, there was no water. Women drank off the eaves when it rained. The toilets were far from the barracks, the rooms covered in human waste.
The leaders of the kok-saghyz detail were French and Polish Communists, and they were past masters in sabotage. Orders called for the women to grow the dandelions and cut their flowers, delicately collecting each seed and gathering the roots, which were cooked down and tested for latex production. “Those dandelion seeds, gee, they certainly do tend to float away,” recalled Simone Alizon, a French resistance fighter who ended up at Rajsko. “And when we blew on them—well they flew away even faster. So the data from the seed collection were false. In the lab, different cooking methods gave contradictory or random results [on the latex weight]. The calculations based on these inexact data were also false. And each of us played his part with utter gravity. I doubt that our experiments would ever have allowed our executioners to develop a rubber industry, but the dandelions saved my life!”
She concluded, “It’s not a good idea to depend on the work of slaves.”
Fleck and the other Hygiene Institute workers walked to Rajsko every day from Block 20 in the main Auschwitz camp. Weber had moved the Hygiene Institute into a large building, across the road from Caesar’s greenhouses on a triangular block of land surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers. SS men with machine guns manned the towers and accompanied the scientists to and from work each day. The scientists carried a patch with a black diamond sewn into it on their left arm, with the initials HKB (Häftlings Krankenbau—prisoner hospital) painted on it. The capos and other leaders had yellow armbands with the lettering “Laboratorium Rajsko.” The walk took about an hour, and if the weather was not too bad it could be almost pleasant. After waking at 4:30 a.m. for roll call, the captive scientists’ column followed the banks of the Sola River past the agricultural station, where women inmates looked up from their fieldwork to wave at them. They passed a row of colorful peasant farmhouses. “In the morning the sky was sometimes a beautiful red, setting aglow the fields to the left across the river,” Micheels, the Dutch student, wrote later. “In the distance, on the right, we could see the chimneys of the crematoria in Birkenau.” The Rajsko inmates often remarked on this contrast. It was difficult to describe the emotions it stirred in them—sorrow, terror, hope, guilt.
The prisoner scientists were a cosmopolitan mixture of Jews and non-Jews from Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, Holland, and France. Weber and the other SS doctors who ran these institutions put on dumb shows of the international scientific style. But the establishments were all form and no substance. They had spotless, well-equipped laboratories where specialists in different fields were instructed to carry out the mechanical actions characteristic of scientific technique. But their actions did not really constitute science, since freedom of inquiry was restricted to matters that were out of date, senseless, unethical, or impractical. It was as if a drunken squad of football players had locked the university’s tenured staff in a laboratory and ordered them to do some science.
Arriving at the institute, the scientists passed through a gate and entered the three-story building. The ground floor had a large bacteriological laboratory, with incubators, driers, refrigerators, centrifuges, and microscopes stolen from laboratories in France and Poland. In a smaller lab across the hall, a Polish scientist did entomological and water research, while a technician prepared culture media for the bacteriological and serological labs. On the next floor was a chemical lab that spanned the length of the building. Although it had a fabulous microscope and a tomograph for making fine-grained microscopic sections, the lab’s primary purpose was to distill alcohol for the SS. After Josef Mengele arrived at Auschwitz and became the chief doctor of the Gypsy camp in mid-1943, he began sending samples from his infamous twin experiments to the lab for analysis. Mengele treated twin children brought to Auschwitz as if they were a collection of living dolls, performing hundreds of surgeries to conjoin twins, change eye color, amputate limbs, and remove kidneys, always without anesthesia. The heads of two of Mengele’s Gypsy children, who had suffered from a malnutrition-related disease causing terrible ulcerations on their small faces, were encased inside jars there. The open eyes of the children stared out through the formalin and glass at the prisoners working in the lab.
On the same floor, Fleck and his team conducted serological examinations. The work, Fleck said, was similar to what he’d done at his private lab in Lwów—examinations of samples for syphilis, typhus, typhoid, and other diseases. “If the patients in the hospital had not been ceaselessly selected for extermination,” Fleck wrote, “one might have thought that these blood, urine, and stool tests served the purpose of healing the sick. That was just another facet of the demonic nonsense that made up life in the Auschwitz camp.” After the war, several witnesses would say that Fleck was working on his typhus vaccine while at Auschwitz. Bruno Seeman recalled that Fleck obtained “great volumes of urine” from the prisoner hospital, although “nothing ever came of it.” The dandelion scientist Caesar stated that Weber had asked him to provide eggs for a typhus vaccine. Yet though Fleck seems to have been selected by Weber because of his vaccine work, there is no other evidence that Fleck was involved in making a vaccine at Auschwitz.
A general state of befuddlement surrounded the purpose of the Hygiene Institute. Weber showed no particular interest in the results of the serological research. Yet at its peak, in 1944, the scientists conducted more than 110,000 separate anal
yses. Most were performed on inmates who were going to die no matter the results, though there were also samples from SS men with tuberculosis or syphilis.
In a little room between Fleck’s lab and the chemistry room, Bruno Weber and his assistant sat writing up the “research,” when they were not carrying out their duties at the “ramp,” sorting out the arriving Jews. In an attic workshop, two Warsaw tailors made sure the SS uniforms were always crisp. A shoemaker and a barber tidied up the SS men and their gear; a mechanic looked over Weber’s Peugeot in the garage. On the building’s top floor, two French researchers, Jakub Lewin of Paris and Marc Klein of Strasbourg University, created dried sera for identifying blood groups. They also often did blood alcohol tests for SS men who had committed some offense or were accused of being drunk on the job. One day, Weber walked into the laboratory and asked a member of Fleck’s group what he was doing. When he responded that he was titrating blood group sera, Weber responded, “Yeah, we have no more group B sera. Those knuckleheads gassed all the gypsies.” (Gypsies have disproportionately high rates of B-group blood types.)
Fleck and his team were something of a mystery to the other inmates. Although everyone knew there were no children at Auschwitz, they had children. Their wives had been saved, too, and they had resources of which most of the inmates could only dream. Frank Stiffel, an inmate from Lwów, was at the point of death in the hospital when one of Dr. Fleck’s assistants, Bernhard Umschweif, suddenly appeared, saying that a mutual friend had sent him. Umschweif spoonfed Stiffel lemonade made from citric acid and sugar, and gave him milk. “My wife is working in the garden near the laboratory, and we have a son, for whom we receive milk,” he said. Stiffel was stunned. “Wife? Son? Milk?” Later Umschweif returned with a carrot and a small grater, with which he prepared Stiffel carrot juice. When Stiffel was better, Umschweif brought him blutwurst and bread.
Despite their celebrity status among the inmates, the children lived in a state of utter and constant terror. Their mothers went to their work during the day, and the children were on their own—Bruno, Karol, and a third boy, Peter. In the autumn, they joined a unit that gathered blueberries and wild strawberries, growing in the ash-enriched soil behind the Birkenau crematoria. For a while, there were some older children in the main camp who served as messengers, but one day toward the end of 1943 they all went away. After that, Bruno Seeman became very worried. “There was no assurance whatsoever what might happen,” he testified. “The three of us were the only kids there. It wouldn’t have taken much for them to decide they didn’t want kids.”
As a Nazi boss, Bruno Weber was “not the worst and not the best,” as one inmate said. He ran the labs at a frantic pace, demanding the scientists work from sunup to sundown processing hundreds or even thousands of samples every day. One inmate described Weber as “elegant, cold and haughty, but ‘correct.’” Micheels said he was “probably the most arrogant, suspicious, and occasionally vicious man I have ever met.” He had neatly combed dark hair and bright blue eyes and “strutted like a peacock in his spotless uniform and shiny boots,” a German shepherd by his side. He was equally nasty to Jews and non-Jews. The scientists spent an inordinate amount of time—about an hour each day—cleaning their laboratories for daily inspection. If Weber or the other SS found a speck of dirt, they would make the doctors do the “toad dance,” bending at the knees and jumping around the laboratory. Weber was needlessly cruel in other ways. The installation had five sheep, whose blood was used to make the Wassermann tests for diagnosing syphilis. Sheep’s blood could also be used to cultivate pathogens such as Streptococcus pyogenes (Group A strep), but Weber insisted it be used only for the syphilis tests. For the other cultures, he told Fleck and the other doctors, they should use their own blood. Despite their meager diets, each of the researchers had to surrender 10–15 cubic centimeters of blood every week.
One irksome task required of the scientists was the regular autopsies on barnyard animals and rabbits. The doctors conducted dozens of cultures every day—sometimes using their own blood as a culture medium—to determine the cause of death of the little rabbits. Often the cause was coccidiosis, a disease triggered by intestinal parasites that were of no relevance to human health. Thanks to the animal research, “we remained alive because like all our comrades, we ate the cadavers to nourish ourselves,” the French scientist André Lettich wrote after the war. “But we were indignant that we were being obliged to conduct these autopsies and cultures knowing that the men who ordered our work were gassing and burning thousands of innocent men, women and children at the same time.” In July 1944, in the midst of the wholesale destruction of the Hungarian Jews, Wirths brought Lettich a tiny dead rabbit, about five days old, in an envelope. A letter explained that the camp commandant wanted to know the cause of death.
Weber enjoyed walking around the grounds with his rifle and shooting any bird he found in his path. If he hit but only wounded a bird, he would bring it to the French-Polish scientist Léon Landau to take care of. One day, he brought Landau a pigeon with a wing three-quarters blown off and said, “Do everything you can to keep this bird alive.” Landau amputated the bird’s wing, but in the process nicked an artery. Weber went into a crazy rage, called him assassin and threatened him with disciplinary action, which is to say, death, unless he saved the bird’s life. Weber returned some time later, and Landau showed him that the bird was still living. “I don’t care,” Weber said. “You can kill it.”
Fleck’s son, Ryszard, witnessed one of the more ghastly episodes at the Rajsko laboratory. Every few days, an SS man brought a big piece of cow or horse flesh to the lab technician, a young Slovak Jew named Imre Gönczi. His job was to trim the fat, pulverize the meat, cook it in glassware, then filter and sterilize the liquid protein broth, which was used by Fleck and other scientists to grow bacterial cultures. One day, the SS man brought Gönczi a big tub containing small pieces of bloody flesh that looked different from the others. Gönczi brought it to a Czech scientist, who confirmed his suspicions. But they couldn’t let on that they knew. “’Til then, I had always shared the leftover boiled horse or beef meat with the other members of the commando,” Gönczi said. Apparently, the SS had noticed that the prisoners were eating the boiled meat. They wanted it for themselves, so they confiscated the meat and replaced it with the body parts of prisoners executed by the Gestapo. “Now, when the guard would ask me, ‘So, how was the meat?’ I had to find some excuse for explaining that we hadn’t eaten it,” Gönczi said. The deliveries from the crematorium continued every week for half a year. Ryszard Fleck had to wash the pots. A man in his group collected the flesh and wrapped it in paper. When no one was watching, he’d bury the remains outside, saying a prayer for the dead.
The most important experiment being conducted in these laboratories, one could say, was the one that showed how easy it was to conduct bad science with a straight face. The scientists conducted exams exactly the way they had done back at their universities. But the results were fungible, and the scientists learned to twist the delicate training of a lifetime in order to fit with the thought style of an alien collective. If an SS man became enraged when a test showed his girlfriend had diphtheria, there was always an alternative analysis that could show a negative result. “Our relations with the SS were sensitive,” wrote Klein, the French scientist. “We were at times required to falsify a diagnostic in order to save a sick comrade or protect a medical friend. Luckily, the SS never verified the tests, although they always signed them as if they were their work.” He often asked himself what purpose the Rajsko institute served. The answer was plain, though. “The SS found relatively easy, stable positions in these laboratories, totally protected from the dangers of a war whose fronts were active and deadly. It was in their interest to have a well-operated lab with overinflated results on a variety of exams. These allowed them to project an image of indispensability to the central SS authorities.”
As for the inmates, they enjoyed protection from the more
dangerous or difficult commandos by wearing the doctor’s blouse. And they hoped it would be enough to survive.
In the spring of 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed and burned at Auschwitz in the space of three months. The chimneys smoked constantly, belching bright fire into the sky at night. “Before that time I always said that May was the most beautiful month of the year,” wrote Wanda Blankenheim of Lwów, who survived Rajsko. “For me it is now always the most horrible month of the year. All May we watched and smelled burning bones, burning people. We saw it with our own eyes.” Another doctor wrote,
When we woke from our sleep at night—we who witnessed all of this and yet continued to eat and sleep like normal people—the inside walls of our block were lit up with the reflection of the blaze. And when I got up and crept out the back doors of the block that faced the crematorium opposite and looked toward the second one, I saw the flames of the open fire next to it and watched as they tossed the dead (and sometimes not quite dead) bodies of the children onto it. I heard their screams, saw how the fire lapped at their tender bodies. No metamorphosis of my being, regardless of whether in this life or the next, will ever expunge this horror from my soul.
Ludwik Fleck was fortunate to miss this particular agony. In December 1943, the Hygiene Institute’s laboratory at Buchenwald, run by Sturmbannführer Ding, was having trouble producing a typhus vaccine. Ding and Mrugowsky were casting about for help, and they decided to requisition Fleck. Near the end of the month, he left Auschwitz in a private car, headed for the concentration camp on the outskirts of Weimar, Germany. He left behind his son and wife. If they survived, he said, they would all meet again at Professor Groër’s clinic in Lwów.
In Lwów, as the war went on, Weigl’s employees at the typhus institute began to have intense disagreements about the morality of their work. An editor from the famous Ossolineum publishing house, Jadwiga Lekczyska, whose job was to prepare the louse intestines, refused ever to use less than the prescribed amount, although many of her colleagues faked it in order to make a weaker vaccine for the Germans. “The building we are working in has a Red Cross on the roof,” she said. So she followed the norm that, as one writer put it, “assured the effectiveness of the vaccine for a thug murdering people in Belarus or Ukrainian villages, the butcher in uniform who massacred ghetto residents.” Knaster, the loud mathematician, disagreed. Sabotage was the holy duty of every Pole, he later told the journalist Ryszard Wójcik. “I have heard the abstract disputes about what means are morally acceptable in the fight against the enemy,” he said. “A physician’s duty is to help a sick person; I as a Pole feel indifferent if a German soldier dies because he was killed by a piece of lead or a typhus germ. The loss of each Nazi increases by a certain percent the chance of survival for the occupied population, decreases the number of the gassed, shot, hanged people.”
