The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (26 page)

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.