by Arthur Allen
Rudolf Weigl, meanwhile, was coming to the end of his road. The Polish Ministry of Health had decided to entrust manufacture of the louse vaccine to his former aide Kryski, who had taken a position in Lublin, and to Przybyłkiewicz in Kraków. This decision broke Weigl’s heart. He made no effort to ingratiate himself with the new order. He refrained from putting his name to petitions of socialist solidarity that scientists were expected to sign; he did not go along to get along. The authorities tolerated him because of his scientific reputation, but did nothing to acknowledge his contributions or the merit of his ideas. The government withdrew its long-standing nomination for the Nobel Prize, and he was never named to the Polish National Academy, a cruel omission. Polish science students did not learn about his work. “Young Polish intellectuals know who Schindler was, but have no idea who Weigl was,” a co-worker wrote in 1994. Like the rest of Polish Lwów, Weigl was shunted aside. How could one defend what had never existed?
He died of a heart attack on August 11, 1957, while resting in Zakopane, in the Carpathians. At Weigl’s memorial service in Kraków, Henryk Mosing, who had obtained special permission to come to Kraków from Lviv, gave a powerful eulogy, drawing together the strands of Weigl’s personality, his bravery and brilliant scientific and technological mind. Mosing was a deeply religious man: he was secretly ordained in Poland by Cardinal Stefan Wyszyski, at a ceremony attended by the future Pope John Paul II. He appeared suddenly at the grave site—delays at the Russian–Polish border had kept Mosing from arriving at the service—and gave an emotional, impromptu speech that tremendously moved those who were there. At first, many of them didn’t recognize Mosing at all—he was an apparition from Lwów, their past, a city that no longer existed for them. “Rudolf Stefan Weigl transformed the louse, a symbol of dirt, misery, and aversion,” Mosing concluded, “into a useful object of scientific research and a lifesaving tool.”
As the service ended and relatives returned to Weigl’s house, they discovered that Anna Herzig had already packed up most of his possessions. In the postwar era, housing was at a premium, and another tenant was ready to move into the house and kept asking when it would be empty. Relatives and friends were told to go in and grab what they could before the rest disappeared. “People pounced on that apartment like a flock of vultures,” said his nephew Fryderyk Weigl. “I have this image of people taking typewriters, refrigerators, with his papers on the floor and people stepping on them. It was chaotic.” While a few of Weigl’s lab implements were preserved and eventually put into museums, most of his life and laboratory were dispersed to the four winds.
Thus it was left to Hermann Eyer to write the most touching obituary to Weigl—in German. “Many doctors from all parts of the world have been able to address the problems of typhus thanks to his friendly readiness to help,” Eyer wrote. “He was one of the greats of his generation of biologists, possessed of an unequaled depth of knowledge and abilities.”
The whispering campaign continued after Weigl’s death. Even in 1983, Przybyłkiewicz continued to denounce Weigl as a traitor, and it was not until the post-Communist 1990s that Weigl’s associates began to rehabilitate him. Eventually—in 2000—a bust of Weigl was erected at Wrocław University’s medical faculty, and a street was named after him there. In 2002, Wacław Szybalski and others began organizing a biannual Polish-Ukrainian scientific conference in his honor. As of this writing, Lviv has not recognized him with so much as a plaque.
Hermann Eyer, who was ingenious, hardworking, and levelheaded, did well after his first, rough postwar years. In the Germany of the 1950s, the keys to academic success were to keep one’s head down, build a career and strong institutions, and ignore the ugly past. In 1956, after leading the creation of the University of Bonn’s school of public health, Eyer won an invitation to do the same at the University of Munich, where his successful career continued.
In 1956, the year before Weigl’s death, Eyer received an unexpected letter. He had assumed that Henryk and Paula Meisel, the Jewish couple he had helped shield at the typhus institute in Lwów, had been murdered at Auschwitz. But here, on the stationery of an Italian hotel, was proof this was not so: “I obtained your address here at a conference in Rome and fulfill what for years has been the need of my heart,” Meisel wrote to him. “If only in a letter, I can send you a few words of thanks. . . . I was always aware that your situation was not easy. And I also appreciated that in this terrible time of darkness you didn’t suffer the common psychosis and managed to maintain your humanity.” In this and subsequent letters, Meisel described the terrible illnesses and starvation he and his wife had suffered in the camps and the early postwar period. They were physically battered, but life was on the mend; they had returned to work at the state health institute; their daughter had married a well-known scientist, and they had two beautiful grandchildren.
Eyer’s response was heartfelt, if a bit awkward. “It would be hard for you to understand how much happiness I have experienced in hearing a sign of life from you,” he wrote back. “All the difficulties and sorrow I had on your account again came into my mind. How great the happiness now, after so many years, to realize that it was not all for nothing. It seems to me that both of us have had burdens to carry. Those evil times left their mark on me, also, and I, too, was not spared the realization that evil too often triumphs in this world.” Later, he wrote, “Understand, when I write you, how thankful I and my wife are that despite the horrible things you and your wife had to pass through, you maintain that generous feeling that allows you to consider me a friend. . . . It is only too easy for me to imagine the terrible suffering you have felt and had to endure, and thus your modest acceptance and happiness with that which remains to you is truly moving.”
Their correspondence, which continued for many years, was warm. Meisel always stressed that the Nazi years were not really over for him. “They often are discussed, and the pain goes on. But you can be sure that in my house and my laboratory, your name is always mentioned with great respect.” In 1972, Meisel asked Eyer to help him get payments from the German state, which provided small sums of money to victims of Nazi oppression if they could offer proof. Describing the hard times his family had experienced, he added, “My friend, do you think we want payment for that? No, such things can never be made good. But our lives are not easy now. We want our daughter to have an easier life than we did.”
Three years later, Eyer wrote Meisel a sad letter. He was glad to hear that Meisel’s daughter was doing well, that his grandchildren were now studying science. Eyer had two sons who both turned to science, the younger becoming a mechanical engineering whiz. But in the summer of 1975, the boy, then 19, had accidentally poisoned himself while doing an experiment in their basement.
Fleck spent seven years in Lublin until being called to Warsaw by his old mentor Groër, who made him director of the bacteriology laboratory at the Mother and Child Hospital. During his Lublin years, Fleck developed a following of loyal female assistants. One of his closest aides was Barbara Narbutowicz, who like Fleck had been in concentration camps. He brought her to Warsaw, where they worked on bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria. After Fleck left Poland, Narbutowicz became a lab chief. She was an aristocratic woman who spoke beautiful French but was modest and hardworking. She and Fleck “understood each other very well,” said another aide, Danuta Borecka. “I would say that they were in love.”
Fleck was a wonderful talker and was always very well-groomed and close-shaven, with pressed shirts and pants—well cared for, in a word. He was terribly nearsighted and wore spectacles that wandered up his nose to his forehead and back. The caustic poverty and untruth of Stalin-era Poland did not seem to wear him down, and others found a refuge in Fleck’s inner freedom. One assistant remembered a dinner at his Warsaw apartment, in a new block on Nowolipie Street. They ate rice with ham, jam, and black coffee with cookies. Ernestyna was an expert shopper—a treasured skill under communism—and had the gift of imparting charm to a ve
ry modest, simply furnished apartment. Also, the Flecks had beautiful silver. Had it been saved, somehow, from the fires of Lwów, an heirloom preserved? No one knew, but it was evident that before the war they had lived in an elegant way.
At work, Fleck ignored the rules that could be ignored, never raised his voice, and never humiliated students or assistants. He sometimes allowed poor students to pass examinations because he could tell they were going to excel in other fields and didn’t want to hold them back. Once he had a pregnant student in this category, and an aide said, “How could you pass that girl?” Fleck responded, “What, I should keep her here until she has the baby?”
While they were living in Warsaw, Fleck and his aide Danuta Borecka boarded a tram after a long wait, and the driver apologized, saying, “We don’t have enough employees.” Fleck responded jokingly, “Why don’t you hire me?” The conductor sneered, “With that face? With a nose like that?” Fleck didn’t say anything, but Borecka could tell he was offended. Fleck did not generally complain of anti-Semitism. Yet it was clearly a factor in postwar life. Certain colleagues—especially those who had survived long years of Soviet penal colonies in Siberia, and might have been anti-Semitic to begin with—were suspicious of Fleck because of his wartime work for Soviet-run institutions in Lwów. At a gathering of medical historians in Wrocław in the 1980s, the former Weigl assistant Zbigniew Stuchly said Fleck should never have worked in the camps with the Nazis—it would have been better to commit suicide instead. During the late 1950s, Fleck’s theory of leukergy was attacked, apparently because it had received such a good reception from Polish scientists who were now out of favor, having been ousted in the de-Stalinization campaign of 1956.
Ludwik and Ernestyna Fleck (seated, right) with his lab members in Warsaw before leaving for Israel, 1957. (Courtesy of Archiv für Zeitgeschichte, Zurich.)
When Balachowsky’s accusations regarding Fleck’s behavior at Buchenwald came to light in Poland, people began to claim that Fleck had been a Nazi collaborator. It was a terribly painful accusation for Fleck, naturally. Barbara Narbutowicz gathered testimony from his friends and brought this and other material to the health ministry, which took no action against Fleck.
By the time Fleck left Warsaw for Israel in 1957, a campaign against the remaining Jews in Poland was in full swing, tied to a backlash against the worst Stalin-era Polish leaders, some of whom happened to be Jewish. Fleck had long thought about moving to Israel; after suffering a heart attack while traveling in Brazil in 1956, Fleck told friends he would not live long and needed to bring his son and wife together. The anti-Semitic drive provided a context for Fleck’s departure, but doesn’t seem to have provoked it. Israeli embassy officials in Warsaw, who were trying to get as many Jews out as possible, told Fleck there was a job waiting for him at Hebrew University. When he arrived, it turned out to have been a false promise, but the Lwów “mafia” in Israel quickly found him another position, at the new state bacteriological laboratory at Ness Ziona.
From Israel, Fleck sent his friends in Poland oranges and fresh herbs, and told them the climate was wonderful. But he never learned to say a single phrase correctly in Hebrew, and could only write his last name—pei, lamed, khaf . “Please do not think that we live here in paradise,” he wrote a friend. “This country has many problems, both internal and external . . . porous, hostile, dangerous borders. A mixed, multilingual, heterogenous population, permanent arrival of new immigrants, often very poor, in need of being settled in somehow. Great idealism on the one hand, extremely selfish, demoralized bums on the other. Young people born in this country haven’t a clue as to what all these foreign, incomprehensible newcomers want. In spite of all this we feel good. Just a pity I’m not younger. I might have been more useful.”
Although Ness Ziona was and remains Israel’s secret biological weapons lab, more routine microbiological research also went on there, and most, if not all, of Fleck’s limited research work there seems to have fallen into this category, though he published a Nature paper concerning brucellosis that might have been related to biodefense. Israeli colleagues were impressed by Fleck’s commitment to fighting disease. He helped lead a campaign against outbreaks of leptospirosis, a rare but severe bacterial disease, on poultry farms. “He introduced the idea that epidemiology could help anyone in the country who needed it,” said David Ben-Nathan, a retired scientist who knew Fleck slightly. “He had suffered typhus, he knew what it was like. He had seen incredible suffering and helped people. And that was the main idea he brought to the institute, that we should be helping people, and it continued after he left.”
One of Fleck’s best friends in Israel was Aleksander Kohn, a Lwów-born virologist who came to Israel before the war and in 1955 founded a science parody magazine, the Journal of Irreproducible Results. Fleck and Kohn had many discussions about microbiology, the history of science, experimental technique, and Fleck’s wartime life. “He looked upon the activities of the SS and the camp authorities as human weakness. Retrospectively, he felt that as an adult he’d become the victim of naughty children,” Kohn said of his friend. As for Fleck’s scientific ideas, the phenomenon of leukergy is discussed in more than 120 journal articles, but his disrupted work never developed enough to make a major impact.
In interviews he gave in the 1950s, Fleck spoke of a sequel to his monograph Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, but no manuscript was found in his papers. In the early 1960s, the physicist-philosopher Thomas Kuhn took Fleck’s ideas a few steps forward. He absorbed the notion of the thought collective into what Kuhn called “normal science,” and added the idea of the “paradigm shift”—the process by which facts once inconvenient to the thought collective suddenly break through and remold it. Social constructivists consider Fleck one of the fathers of their discipline, but—to use a Fleckian term—his ideas were more like a “proto idea” of social constructivism, a precursor with a different significance. The practitioners of this field belong to a different thought collective, one transformed by the loosening respect for all types of authority that began in the 1960s. While pointing out its social malleability, Fleck never relativized the value of science. He probably would have been drawn to some of the more cutting-edge biomedical disciplines such as epigenetics, which are acknowledged by the mainstream but less developed partly because of the lack of broad public awareness. He would glory in the free scientific exchanges of the Internet era. He was never a man of extremes.
Many documents from Ludwik Fleck’s life disappeared in the upheavals of the 20th century. Letters and documents were lost during the war. Correspondence with the Lublin biochemist Józef Parnas was confiscated by the Polish secret police when Parnas got into trouble in 1968. When Fleck died, he left his papers in the care of his best friend in Israel, Markus Klingberg, deputy director of Ness Ziona. But Klingberg, a Pole who had been an epidemiologist in the Soviet Union during the war, was arrested by Israel’s Shin Beth intelligence service in 1983 as a spy for the Soviet Union. Fleck’s papers were seized and, Klingberg says, destroyed. Luckily, a German sociology student who had visited Klingberg a few years earlier had photocopied many of them.
Klingberg recruited at least two spies during his quarter-century espionage career in Israel, and some Fleck scholars have speculated that he might have recruited Fleck as well. After all, Fleck never concealed his gratitude toward the Communist inmates who saved his life at Buchenwald. But Klingberg denies such a thing occurred. “Fleck was at Auschwitz! After all he had been through, I didn’t want to complicate his life,” Klingberg told me in an interview in Paris, where he was allowed to join his daughter in 2003 after 20 years in Israeli prisons. It seems doubtful Fleck would have been a willing Soviet spy. He was a man of the left, but no great adept of Marxian versions of the truth. In any case, he did not live long in Israel.
In 1961, less than four years after his arrival, Fleck suffered a second heart attack, while undergoing treatment for malignant lymphoma, and died a few days later
in hospital. Just before his death, he and Ernestyna had received a letter from the West German government announcing the approval of their Wiedergutmachung, a payment of several thousand dollars in compensation for their suffering at the hands of the Nazis. They cried with relief, for life was hard, and Fleck worried about Ernestyna’s future.
His body was brought from their apartment to the institute, and the funeral cortege left from there to the cemetery nearby. Today, the institute’s epidemiology building bears his name.
* Przybyłkiewicz was the only scientist affiliated with Weigl’s institute who published with Eyer during the occupation, coauthoring an article about typhus.
AFTERWORD
When the Germans abandoned Naples in October 1943 under American attack, they dynamited the water supply; a short time later, typhus broke out among the lice-ridden residents who had sought shelter from Allied bombing raids in the subterranean maze of old tunnels beneath the city. The invaders offered typhus vaccine to priests, medical workers, and a few others; the GIs themselves had all been vaccinated with the Cox vaccine, and not a single GI died of typhus. But the vaccine was employed sparsely in combating the Naples typhus epidemic. Most of the work was done with portable metal pesticide sprayers, the kind that suburban dads used to kill garden bugs. GIs sprayed three million lousy Neapolitans with DDT. The U.S. Typhus Commission had tested the powder against typhus in North Africa, where the sprayers came in handy to get at vermin in the robes of modest Muslim women, and they worked just as well in Italy. In the first typhus epidemic encountered by the U.S. Army in World War II, DDT, not vaccine, defeated the disease. The epidemic burned out in February.
