The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (25 page)

The caged lice made the feeders itch, but scratching was forbidden, because it could lead to infections that hurt the lice. Conversation was the best distraction. “When you put on the lice cages,” Szybalski explained, “the first feeling is like a hot iron, as 500 or 1,000 of them pierce your skin. You don’t want that to be repeated, so you try not to move the cages, because then the lice lose their place and have to bite again.”
Marek Zakrzewski
was one of the youngest members of Szybalski’s group. His career as a feeder started on a rough note: he got blisters from the bites. The condition resolved, fortunately, and Zakrzewski returned to feeding, and found himself looking forward to the daily discussions. He especially liked listening to Mieczysław Kreutz, a chatty psychologist. One winter day, Kreutz turned to Banach and Knaster and asked them the following question: “Gentlemen,” he said, “when my wife used to make ice cream, she would pour some liquid and ice into the container, then pour in salt and turn the crank. I asked her, why do you use salt? She says it makes the ice cream freeze. Coming over here today, I see the tram conductor throwing something on the tracks. What is it? Salt. Why? So the rails don’t freeze. So how is it? One throws salt to cause freezing, the other to prevent it.” A passionate, uninformed debate followed. Zakrzewski, an engineering student, knew the answer, but traditional Polish academic protocol called for students to speak only when spoken to. So the problem remained unsolved. (Answer: in both instances, salt lowers the freezing point. This melts ice on roadways; the ice cream is mixed while surrounded by colder-than-freezing water.)

Banach usually sat
quietly chain-smoking while Knaster yakked on, whether mathematics or politics was the subject. The Krzemieniewskis explained the life habits of the creatures they were feeding. Aleksander Kosiba, a meteorologist, regaled them with tales from his polar exhibitions. Sushi being known only to the Japanese at this time, the feeders were thrilled by his descriptions of eating raw fish and whale meat. Even in this lugubrious atmosphere, their legs clasped with cages of hungry insects in a room reeking of wood alcohol, smoke, and their own blood, the feeders wrinkled their noses at these exotic flavors. It was intellectually stimulating but also surrealistic to listen to the long discussions about the frontiers of mathematics, topology and the theory of numbers. But Szybalski had to make sure that in the fervor of discussion they did not overfeed the lice. The mathematicians, especially, were generally too distracted to know when to stop, and the Weigl laboratory lice had lost their natural instinct to stop feeding. This could have disastrous consequences. Overfed lice were hard to handle. They would burst and create a sticky mess.

As for the feeders, “they never complained,” said Szybalski. “They were happy to be able to survive, or to hope they would survive—it wasn’t guaranteed. Every day you said goodbye you never knew if you’d see them again. Your life was unprotected. It depended upon the whims of soldiers and policemen and militia.” Szybalski and his friends kept their wits by imagining that the war would end. It would be only another month or two, they said, over and over again. They were young and unafraid because death happened to other people, not them.

Lice feeders during the war. (Courtesy of the Emil-Behring-Bibliothek, Philipps-Universität Marburg.)

Szybalski was particularly
fond of Banach, who told him that mathematics was the most magnificent expression of the human soul. They shared a passion for learning and for Lwów, and they called each other “brother,” which was strictly against academic tradition. Banach was like that. He liked nothing better than to thumb his nose at hauteur. He also appreciated Szybalski because every day the young man related to him all the latest, forbidden radio news from around the world.
Banach’s love for Lwów
was epitomized in the possibly apocryphal story told about Banach and his Hungarian-born friend John von Neumann. In the late 1930s, as the walls closed in on Poland, von Neumann came to Lwów on three occasions to transmit a message from Norbert Wiener of MIT. The university would pay Banach generously to emigrate to the United States and teach in Cambridge. “How much?” Banach asked, finally. Von Neumann wrote a 1 and told him, “as many zeros as you want after that.” Banach looked at the paper for a moment and then said, “It isn’t enough.”

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 tools 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.