by Arthur Allen
By cramming half a million wretchedly poor people into a few square blocks in the dead of winter, the German doctors created a typhus epidemic. Then they blamed the Jews for it. In the second winter of the German occupation, the self-fulfilling prophecies of the Nazi doctors began to come true. The overcrowded, underfed, and unwashed Warsaw ghetto swarmed with vermin, and the streets were so packed that you could easily pick up lice bumping into someone. The lice “crawled over the pavements, up stairways, and dropped from the ceilings of the public offices,” recalled the musician Henryk Szpilman in his memoir, The Pianist. “Lice found their way into the folds of your newspaper, your small change. There were even lice on the crust of the loaf you had just bought. And each of these verminous creatures could carry typhus.” One saw lice massed like shimmering helmets on the heads of innumerable street urchins, practically eating them alive.
Thousands were dying each month. The Jews of the Warsaw ghetto, despite the urging of their German doctors, preferred to live. If they could not flee, they sought out the only known protection against typhus: Rudolf Weigl’s vaccine. By November 1940, it had become the most coveted item on the black market, and Weigl one of the most admired figures in the ghetto. Over the next 18 months, at least 30,000 doses would find their way behind the ghetto walls through a variety of means, some heroic, some the product of simple lucre. Weigl arranged to smuggle the vaccine to the Warsaw ghetto from Lwów through two of his employees, who were ostensibly sent to gather lice for research purposes. Such scientific missions were not unusual—another Polish employee of the institute flew to Stalingrad to recover lice from a sick army officer. Weigl’s aides carried large bottles of vaccine, which was said to resemble black coffee. They delivered it to Ludwik Hirszfeld, founding director of the Polish Hygiene Institute, whom the Nazis had sent to the ghetto in 1940. Hirszfeld sold the vaccines to ghetto inhabitants at a low price, using the proceeds to fund desperately needed health care programs for children. The German doctors Robert Kudicke and Rudolf Wohlrab, who had occupied Hirszfeld’s office, were trying at the time to produce an egg-based vaccine. Meanwhile, their Polish employees secretly produced their own louse-based vaccine, which they smuggled into the ghetto and to resistance fighters in the forest. Kudicke’s private secretary was actually a Home Army activist working with Action N, the resistance’s sly propaganda arm.
In Lwów, the Jewish survivor Frank Stiffel recalled, two Polish men—“nouveau riche hoodlums”—arrived at his apartment from Warsaw. Stiffel’s father managed to obtain about 20 vials of Weigl vaccine each week from hospital workers and nurses in Lwów, and delivered them to the businessmen at a meeting place near the train station. Each dose sold in Warsaw for 1,000 zlotys—in the neighborhood of $200, and a king’s ransom at a time when those lucky enough to have a job were glad to earn 100 zlotys a month. “Everyone had to earn a living,” said Stiffel. “Once a week these guys would come to buy our supply. This lasted until the Germans occupied Lwów, at which point it was not easy to travel to Warsaw anymore.”
In Warsaw, the goal was to obtain the Weigl vaccine by hook or by crook. “The chief subject of conversation among both rich and poor was typhus; the poor simply wondered when they would die of it, while the rich wondered how to get hold of Dr Weigel’s [sic] vaccine and protect themselves,” Szpilman wrote.
Dr Weigel, an outstanding bacteriologist, became the most popular figure after Hitler: good beside evil, so to speak. People said the Germans had arrested the doctor in Lemberg, but thank God had not murdered him, and indeed they almost recognized him as an honorary German. It was said they had offered him a fine laboratory and a wonderful villa with an equally wonderful car, after placing him under the wonderful supervision of the Gestapo to make sure he did not run away rather than making as much vaccine as possible for the louse-infested German army in the east. Of course, said the story, Dr Weigel had refused the villa and the car.
I don’t know what the facts about him really were. I only know that he lived, thank God, and once he had told the Germans the secret of his vaccine and was no longer useful to them, by some miracle they did not finally consign him to the most wonderful of all gas chambers. In any case, thanks to his invention and German venality many Jews in Warsaw were saved from dying of typhus, if only to die another death later.
Although the ghetto inhabitants were grateful to Weigl, they were not always convinced of the vaccine’s value. “I was inoculated yesterday for the second time against typhus,” the ghetto leader Adam Czerniaków wrote in his diary in February 1942. “The blood test showed a negative reaction, which indicates that I could still contract the disease. Several months ago the rabbis proposed that a marriage ceremony be performed in a cemetery. This is supposed to bring about the end of the epidemic. The scientists who do the blood testing and at the same time declare that neither a positive nor a negative reaction is conclusive are as helpful as the above-mentioned rabbis.” Czerniaków did not contract typhus. He committed suicide in July 1942 rather than participate in the deportation of Warsaw’s remaining Jews to Treblinka.
The Nazis, who by then had occupied all of Western Europe save Britain, invaded Yugoslavia in May 1941. As rumors grew of an imminent Nazi drive into the Soviet Union, the Russians tightened security at Weigl’s institute in Lwów, prohibiting staff from staying after hours without permission. The NKVD developed a contingency plan, Weigl later told an associate, whereby, in case of war, agents would seize typhus laboratory workers and transport them deep into Russia, where a new vaccine plant would open. Weigl was to go with the first group, but for some reason—probably Soviet disorganization, or surprise at the timing of the Nazi invasion—the plan was never carried out.
Fleck and his friends awaited the next stage of the war with foreboding. On July 20, 1941, the mathematician Hugo Steinhaus visited Fleck’s laboratory at the bacteriological institute on Zielona Street and observed clumped cells under a microscope; Fleck was beginning to investigate the phenomenon of leukergy, the agglomeration of white blood cells that he thought might be diagnostic for certain types of illnesses. The two friends discussed the terrifying political situation, which Fleck described as a “permanent sepsis.” In the late afternoon, Steinhaus walked into the Wulka hills and lay down in the grass, thinking and worrying.
CHAPTER SIX
PARASITES
The Soviets abandoned Lwów as suddenly as they had entered it. On June 21, 1941, their tanks began rattling past Fleck’s apartment on the same route they had taken entering the city 22 months earlier. Operation Barbarossa—the largest invasion in the history of warfare, involving 3.9 million German troops on a 1,800-mile front stretching from the Baltics to the Black Sea—took Stalin by surprise, though he had received plenty of warning from the British and even his own spies. The Soviets had done nothing to prepare the people in the territories they abandoned for war with the Nazis. In Lwów, they left a disoriented city, with many of its best and brightest dead or in exile. The Soviets had rubbed out most of the resistance to Stalin. Thousands of Polish army officers had been murdered or exiled. The Nazis, meanwhile, had had nearly two years to prepare and refine their mechanisms of terror and control in Poland. Ukrainian nationalists lay low under Soviet rule, but the Germans had cultivated and trained these malcontents, holding up promises of an independent Ukrainian state after the Nazi conquest. In the weeks before the invasion, Ukrainian nationalists had begun to whisper that Hitler would be welcomed not with flowers but with the heads of Poles and Jews.
Lwów during the three years of German occupation was a Hobbesian theater, every man for himself under a ruthless occupant. The city was crawling with informants—Ukrainians, Poles, and even a few Jews who would turn in a fellow Jew or a resister for a chance to survive. The Lwów chapter of the the London-based Home Army resistance movement, or AK, was riddled with anti-Semites and thus an unreliable ally. The city was full of Jewish refugees, perhaps as many as 50,000, now trapped in Lwów alongside the 100,000 or so previous Je
wish residents. Germany’s goal was the annihilation of all these Jews, and it succeeded with surprisingly few exceptions.
The Jews of Lwów had four ways to survive the German occupation. The first was to pass—to obtain a non-Jewish identity. The second was to be hidden by friends, or to flee to a small village or into the forest, where if one was lucky one might obtain the protection of a sympathetic villager (especially if the villager received regular payments). The third was to hide in the sewers. None of these avenues was safe or permanent. Nor, in the long run, was the fourth—working in an occupation of value to the German war effort. Thousands of Jews sought such jobs and even paid for them, receiving nothing in return but hard work, starvation rations, and a temporary shelter from the Gestapo that could be exposed at any moment. Eventually, the Gestapo raided nearly all of the allegedly “safe” businesses. But in a few cases, having the right job kept you alive and even allowed you to help others. Simon Wiesenthal, the postwar Nazi hunter, survived the war as a draftsman in the Lwów railroad repair yards, under the jurisdiction of the Wehrmacht. There he used his skills and work tools to create fake identification papers for hundreds of Jews. Others survived for a few years in the oil industry because of their engineering expertise. The odds were grim. More than 130,000 Jews died in Lwów under German occupation. Each of these deaths is a story of misery and terror. Together, they represent a fate that is simply beyond imagining.
The second Nazi invasion of Lwów began with aerial bombing before dawn on June 21, 1941. Later that day, the Soviets started to withdraw from the city, but the German advance briefly stalled a few days later, and Russian NKVD officers returned to complete unfinished business. They had been holding about 3,000 prisoners, many of them at Saint Brigid’s, the grim, thick-walled Habsburg dungeon a few blocks from the Opera House. Before abandoning Lwów for good on June 28, the Russians set about killing them. Some were lined up neatly and shot by firing squads. In other cases, hand grenades were tossed into cells, or the prisoners were bayoneted. Some were buried in shallow pits, others left where they’d fallen. A Russian chauffeur who lived in the Szybalskis’ building joined in the killing spree before leaving town. “He came back covered in blood and left his bloody things in the apartment,” Wacław Szybalski recalled. The Soviets set fire to Saint Brigid’s as their final act.
On the last day of June, Szybalski, Wiktor Weigl, and a few other boys accompanied their friend Franek Schramm to look for Schramm’s father, a wealthy Jewish lawyer who had been arrested a few days before the Soviet retreat. The Schramms lived on the top floor of the Sprecher-Haus, a graceful seven-story art nouveau structure in the very center of the city, by the Adam Mickiewicz column and the George Hotel. The boys visited the Lcki, Zamarstynowska, and Saint Brigid’s prisons. “It was a slaughterhouse. You entered into these cells, and in some the bodies were neatly stacked in six. In others they were lying all around,” Szybalski said. “The weather was hot, and we had no gloves. It was a very unpleasant job, and you never knew when the Germans would show up. After three days, I had had enough. After a while, the bodies didn’t look so human. We never found his father.”
Amid plundering and arson, the first troops of the German 17th Army entered Lwów and hung a giant swastika flag above the town hall at noon on June 29, 1941. Lwów, which under the Russians had become Lviv, was now Lemberg again. Clocks set to Moscow time were now switched to Berlin time, three hours later. The first invaders many residents encountered were members of an Austrian unit—the “Edelweiss”—which some Jews remembered favorably from their service in the kaiser’s army. In the wake of the Wehrmacht, more sinister elements slipped into the city: Ukrainian nationalists trained in western Poland, and Einsatzkommando units, SS men whose mission was to incite ethnic hatred and murder Jews, Communists, and other perceived enemies. The first posters went up with the notification that anyone resisting German orders would be shot. And the orders would be endless. No Jew could possess a radio. No Jew could possess skis. No Jew could practice medicine on an Aryan. No Jew could be employed. Helping a Jew was forbidden. And on and on, in infinite detail and with ever-refined cruelty, leading to the final, unwritten stipulation: to the Jew it was forbidden to breathe.
On the second day, the Germans put up posters enumerating the alleged atrocities committed by “Jewish Bolshevists” at Saint Brigid’s and the two other prisons. This provided the pretext for what occurred a few days later—the worst pogrom in the city’s history. The morning of July 3, thousands of Ukrainians, mostly male peasants between the ages of 15 and 30, appeared seemingly out of nowhere and began beating up Jews with staves and metal bars. In plain daylight, in the central streets of the city, they broke bones, tore beards, and forced religious Jews to drink urine or beat each other. They went from house to house stealing and ransacking apartments, shoving valuables into burlap bags. Crowds of men and women lined the streets and applauded the thugs, or simply watched the orgy of violence with amazement. Well-dressed Jews were ordered onto their knees to scrub the pavement in front of the Opera House.
“I heard the howling, the yelling, the giggling of the beasts,” recalled a Jewish businessman who worked in downtown Lwów. “They tore our skin and muscles, beat out eyes, broke bones, beat on our heads, shoulders, and arms. . . . The streets were crammed full of onlookers resembling humans.”
Staff at Weigl’s laboratory saw Ukrainians and SS herding hundreds of Jews through the streets with whips and sticks. There was a strong element of sexual humiliation involved; elegant women were stripped naked and beaten until blood poured from their faces. Dr. Stefan Kryski, who was spending nights in the Weigl lab to avoid the violence, took in a few of the victims and treated their wounds. “I had no particular sympathy for the Jews, especially after their behavior under Soviet rule,” Kryski, then an old man, wrote in 1994, “but I had never imagined that men could be so cruel to fellow human beings simply because of their nation or race. Unfortunately, what we saw in July was only a rehearsal for an enormous spectacle of death.”
Pogrom in Lwów, July 1, 1941. (Courtesy of the Wiener Library.)
Rabbi Ezekiel Lewin, leader of the Reform temple in Lwów, had just visited his friend Andrzej Graf Szeptycki, the Greek Catholic archbishop, seeking help in calming the Ukrainians. Szeptycki, who lived in a spacious palace, pleaded with Lewin to stay with him, but the rabbi insisted on returning to his people. He was seized at the doorstep of his house and dragged to Saint Brigid’s, where a carnival of violence and horror awaited. Naked Jews, men, women, and children, knelt on the cobblestones washing away blood, or dragged bodies into the courtyard, driven by whips, kicks, and blows from German and Ukrainian rifle butts. The smell of the week-old corpses, rotting in temperatures that soared above 90 degrees, was unbearable. A firing squad shoved Rabbi Lewin into a corner and shot him along with a physician, Dr. Perec Gleich, and Henryk Hescheles, editor of the liberal Polish-language daily Chwila (Moment). It was the beginning of the end of assimilated Lwów Jewry.
A Nazi propaganda film made in early July shows Ukrainian children and women, babushkas in head scarves, keening and weeping over hundreds of bodies laid out in a yard. “Nothing stopped these monsters in human form,” says the narrator. “With machine guns, knives, axes, and hand grenades these innocent victims of Bolshevik death-lust were cruelly murdered.” The next frames show the faces of Jews, swollen from beatings. “The murderous Jewish rabble, who worked hand in hand with the Soviet GPU, were delivered to German troops for punishment by an angry crowd.” The Nazis wholly invented the idea that Jews had murdered the Ukrainians, but it was crassly effective propaganda within the brutal circumstances. “We could see them beating Jews in the street from our windows,” recalled Alex Redner, whose father, Marek, was a leading internist in Lwów. “My father was going out to bandage people half dead in the street. The wounded came to his office for help. Street mobs were running after Jews. That was the preamble. From that point on we had hardly a day of peace and quiet. From the day the
Germans arrived, it was like being a rat trapped at the bottom of a pit.”
The number of Jews murdered in the inaugural spate of violence in Lwów has been put at 4,000 to 7,000. On July 25, another blood rite was arranged for the Ukrainians: three days of violence to commemorate a Russian Jew’s 1926 murder of the Ukrainian leader Symon Petlura in Paris. An estimated 2,000 Jews died in the “Petlura Days.” The Germans unleashed wave upon wave of violence during the following two years, campaigns in which Ukrainians and Nazis, sometimes assisted by Jewish militiamen, descended upon a neighborhood to arrest and kill and deport to the death camps. Each of these Aktionen, as they were called, left anywhere from a few thousand to 50,000 dead. From one Aktion to another, things calmed down. In these periods of relative inaction, the Jews were subject to daily harassment, beatings, blackmail, and murder, over a background of starvation, terror, depression, and disease.
The first pogroms were followed by an avalanche of Nazi legal orders that left the Jewish community no time to recover or organize. No radios or telephones, no employment of Aryans by Jews, no school for Jewish children, no Jews at food markets or public places of any kind, no Jews on the streetcars or railroads, no Jewish prayer. The last order was accompanied by the burning of most of the city’s synagogues, including the 16th-century Golden Rose, with its alabaster Gothic arches. Jews were stripped of everything they owned and ordered to wear blue-on-white Star-of-David armbands.